


Flicker From View

by somuchforbaggles



Category: Supernatural
Genre: (in gang form), Alternate Universe - Roommates/Housemates, Bisexual Dean, Ghost Castiel, Leviathans, M/M, Mechanic Dean, POV Castiel, POV Dean Winchester, brief possession
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-20
Updated: 2015-07-17
Packaged: 2018-01-15 13:20:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 45,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1306297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somuchforbaggles/pseuds/somuchforbaggles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean’s roommate is a ghost. Not in the way that he never sees the guy who pays half the rent, but in the way that someone with unfinished business died in his apartment. Sure, having someone who'll listen to him talk is awesome, but it's lonely as hell when his ghost can only talk back by writing in a steamed-up mirror.</p><p>Then one day, Castiel the friendly ghost mysteriously materalises.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I started this as a ficlet series on [ tumblr](http://ghostran.tumblr.com/tagged/ghost%20au) and meant for it to be around 3 parts, but it snowballed and...well, let's just say I am laughing at my past self for ever thinking it could be that short.
> 
> Rating will change as I add more chapters, and more characters will arrive later.

Not even before Dean had stepped foot in his apartment, the coffee machine went haywire.

“Yeah, Cas, I get it, I missed you too,” he called to the kitchen, grinning.

The TV came to life just as Dean was going to switch it on himself, something that happened since Cas had found out that Dean’s favourite show had moved to an earlier slot, so he set the remote down and relaxed on the couch to watch Dr. Sexy save another life.

Dean rolled his eyes when the volume fluctuated. “Did you get bored today, buddy?” The level flicked between thirteen and fourteen, something Dean had come to know as Cas nodding. “You want me to talk for a while?”

_Thirteen fourteen thirteen fourteen thirteen fourteen._

He chuckled. His ghost could be so damn needy sometimes. Not that Dean blamed him, as he knew that if he were to spend the whole day cooped up and alone, he’d get bored and needy too.

So Dean’s roommate was a ghost. Not in the way that he never saw the guy who paid half the rent, but in the way that someone with unfinished business had died in his apartment. Whatever. He’d had weirder roommates.

"Come on then," he said, gesturing to the air, "let’s go steam up the mirror for you."

That was their only way of conversing. Dean would run the shower at its highest, talking all the while the bathroom mirror steamed up, and when prompted for a reply or answer, Cas would write on it with his delicate ghost fingers.

Once the bathroom was suitably steamy and his ass was getting numb from sitting on the lid of the toilet, Dean began to talk. Just about work, and the customers, and what Sam said when he called today. When he started talking about Sam, a smiley face squeaked onto the mirror.

"Ugh, the smiley face again?"

_Yes_

Ever since Dean had taught him various emoticons, Cas wouldn't stop using them, especially the smiley face when he brought up Sam.

"I swear you have a crush on my brother," he teased. "Whenever he comes round, you make the blender go crazy and the lamp flicker like a bitch. And you write smiley faces when I talk about him!" Dean smirked.

_Can you blame me? I only have you and_

Cas stopped writing for a minute or so so the mirror could fog up again, but kept turning the light on and off so Dean knew he was still there. It was always comforting when Cas did that. Whenever Dean needed someone to listen to him work something out, the ghost would alternate the spotlights down the corridor that led to his bedroom, and Dean would follow the lights, sit on the end of his bed, and just  _vent_  while Cas occasionally tampered with his bedside lamp.

It was good to know that Cas was there in every sense of the word, even if he couldn't see him.

Steam had covered the words like snow over tracks, so Cas began writing again, this time with smaller letters.

_the TV, and Sam is interesting and hardly visits. I like Sam. But not romantically._

"I'm sure he'll be heartbroken," Dean said dryly.

An ellipsis dotted itself onto the mirror, and Dean laughed. "Honestly dude, if you were real, I bet your face would be a hell of a picture."

_?? Real???_

"You know what I mean. Visible, tangible."

_Why would my face be a picture_

Dean shook his head at how Cas could overuse punctuation and then use none at all within the span of two sentences, but it was all part of the ghost's charm, and he supposed that if Cas wasn't so...  _Cas,_  well then Dean wouldn't like him much at all - Hell, he probably would have moved out by now.

And then it hit him.

Dean would actually have to move out one day.

Maybe when he'd settled down, or when he got enough money to buy a better place, or if something happened to Sam and he had to move a state over.

And Cas would be alone. Or worse, stuck with someone who he didn't get on with.

In Dean's mind, the worst case scenario of someone else moving in was that Cas would like them  _better_ , would set off all the appliances in the room when they entered it, would write in the same mirror he would talk to Dean in, would -

A squeak brought him back to the present.

_Dean?_

"Yeah?" He sounded utterly wrecked as his reply caught in his throat.

_You look sad :( I don't like it._

Dean huffed a humourless laugh. "Neither do I, Casper."

_> :( CasTIEL_

"But you're a friendly ghost! And I call you Cas! It fits!" he protested. Cas didn't reply, so Dean's mouth asked before his mind caught up, "Hey, can you put your hand on the side of the sink?"

There was a pause, and then the mirror read,  _Why?_

"Because."

Another pause. Dean could almost hear the ghost thinking, and he hoped that what he was about to do would be okay, because he just needed to try it once, to see what would happen.

Most likely, nothing would happen; but there was a very small percentage that  _something_  would happen.

 _It's there,_  shaky writing told him.

Dean rested his hand on the edge of the sink. "Is my hand... is it on yours?"

He nearly fell off the toilet lid as the bathroom was plunged into darkness with a pop of the lightbulb. The water was turned off at the same time, and the silence that came after was more deafening than the white noise of the shower could ever be.

"What the crap just happened?" exclaimed a startled Dean. "Did you do that?"

And then Dean heard something he never thought he'd hear: a deep, confused voice saying:

"I... I appear to have materialised."


	2. Chapter 2

Dean gaped at Castiel’s silhouette. 

"You… you materialised?" he repeated in awe, his voice reverberating around the tiles.

Castiel had a silhouette. Which meant he had a body. A body that Dean would be able to see if it weren’t for a popped lightbulb. He resisted the temptation to reach out and touch Cas’s hand for real, and the even bigger temptation to pull him into a very long hug for being the best ghost anyone could ever wish for.

The silhouette checked all his limbs were still in their correct places, cleared his throat, and confirmed, “It seems so, yes.”

Willpower never was Dean’s strong point, something attested to by the amount of pie he’d eaten over the years, so he rose, faced his very real friend, and wrapped his arms around Cas’s shoulders.

What Dean didn’t anticipate was that Cas would immediately jump away from him.

They both froze in the darkness, Dean, rejected and embracing negative space, Castiel, spooked and backed up against the wall.

"Am I still visible?" Cas urgently asked. "Dean, can you hear me?"

Dean frowned, confused and more than a little hurt. “Yeah, I can hear you fine, but we’re still in the dark, so…”

He sat on the edge of the tub, making no move to leave the bathroom and see the light of day. Dean told himself that he was staying in the dark because it would seem wrong to have their first ever real conversation anywhere else but there, and ignored the reason of  _what does he look like_  niggling in the back of his mind.

A relieved rush of air filled the silence.

"Thank God. I thought that if you touched me again then I would dematerialise and become invisible to you again."

“ _That’s_  why you didn’t wanna hug me?” Dean let out a short laugh. “I thought you just didn’t want to.”

"You think that I would pass up the first chance I’ve had at human contact in years if I didn’t think that it would send me back to being incorporeal?" Cas said petulantly, in just the way that Dean had imagined he would.

He smiled and fiddled with his fingers. “I guess not.”

Now that Dean thought about it, Cas’s irrational touch light logic of  _touch me once, I appear, touch me again, I disappear_  made absolute sense, and while he loved pie, he sure was glad that life hadn’t Pushing Daisy’d him.

Cas’s foot nudged his, and a jolt of electricity ran through Dean’s body, sending goose-pimples up his arms and standing his hair on end.

"I would very much like to try hugging you again, now that we know I am not going to disappear," a shy Cas said, and Dean was torn between craving an electric embrace and needing a comforting cuddle. After all, Cas had been around ever since before he had moved in nearly three years ago, and though he didn’t like to admit it, Dean was a tactile man, and sometimes it hurt that he couldn’t hug his friend when he wanted.

His mind wandered back to what kind of hug he wanted their first to be, and Dean figured that a mix was always good, if he could get it - which he supposed he might, seeing as he wasn’t sure whether Cas was ghost or human right now.

Dean’s heart thumped against his chest as he pushed himself up from the rim of the tub. The tips of his toes just met with Cas’s in the small space, and he heard a happy hum at the contact, and then felt Cas’s toes wiggling against his. Dean gave a light, shaky laugh, his heavy iron arms slowly being drawn to Cas’s magnetism, and his mind blank but for hoping that this time would be better than the last.

It was.

Cas’s hands snaked around his waist and held him tighter than anyone ever had. His chin rested over Dean’s shoulder, and when Cas swallowed, Dean could feel his adam’s apple bobbing on his collar bone, and occasionally, a buzz of static would pass between the two of them. It was certainly worth waiting nearly three years for, and it made Dean question how he could have gone on longer without finding a way to do this.

"Okay," Dean mumbled into Cas’s hair, "I’m ready to see you now."

A breath warmed Dean’s shoulder. “Good; because I’m ready for you to see me.”

Pulling away and patting Castiel’s very solid chest, Dean walked towards the light, Cas following and very aware of what that could mean if he were still fully ghost.

When the setting sun hit Dean’s face, a great sense of warmth and contentment rushed through him, though when the grip on his hand that he hadn’t realised was there tightened, he thought that maybe the warmth and the contentment had rushed in to fill the sudden lack of loneliness. Physical loneliness, that was. Sam was always nagging him to go out, get a date, but every time Dean gave in, he found himself thinking about Cas the whole night. Plus, hearing the coffee machine go crazy when he got home seemed to be more satisfying than a night on the town could ever be.

He tugged on Cas’s hand. “Come on, dude, let me see you! I’m not as shallow as my brother thinks I am, I promise.”

Cas tentatively stepped out, and Dean forgot how to breathe.


	3. Chapter 3

Seeing Cas for the first time reminded Dean of the end of  _Beauty and the Beast_ , when the Beast transforms under pink, blue, and golden lights into a handsome prince, and Belle studies him skeptically until she meets his piercing blue eyes, and says, ‘ _It_ is _you!_ ’

Of course, Cas wasn’t a beast, and his life wasn’t a Disney movie, but Dean heard the score of the transformation scene perfectly clearly in his mind, and when he met Cas’s own piercing blue eyes, something inside him clicked and his stupid cheesy rom-com heart whispered,  _It’s you._

”Man, you look exhausted,” was apparently the only thing Dean could think of to say.

"Yes, well," Cas said with a smile, "the night I died, I was incredibly sleep-deprived. I lost count of how many cups of coffee I had that day."

Cas’s smile was the tiniest thing, yet it triggered the hugest swell in Dean’s chest. As it would with anyone’s, obviously, because one, he’d just seen his friend smile for the first time ever after resigning himself to the fact that it would never happen on account of Castiel being a  _ghost_ , and two, Cas’s smile was the fucking cutest.

He grinned back at his friend and clapped him on the shoulder. “But look at you, man! Totally corporeal! And I gotta say, your hair’s a total mess, but we can fix that easy.”

"Yes, I am aware of your many hair products," Cas said, his tone letting Dean know that he was internally rolling his eyes. "And I would apologise for the state of my hair, but I didn’t get the chance to style it before I was brutally murdered."

Dean’s grin froze. “Brutally?”

The voice that came from Dean was small, small enough for Cas to make a face and gingerly turn around, showing his back to Dean.

His very bloodstained back.

Dean reeled, and his mouth fell open in a horrified ‘o’.

"Cas…" Whatever he was going to say stopped in his throat, Cas’s name having made a desert out of his mouth. He couldn’t talk, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but reach out and hover his fingers over the large burgundy mark. If he didn’t know better, he would have given it a glance and passed it off as a wine spill - but as Dean did know better, his face fell into an expression not unlike the sad emoticon he had taught his ghost.

"I know it looks harrowing," Cas said in his gravelly voice, "but I have no scars. My body is as I remember it. Look."

He hiked his shirt up to below his armpits, and only then did Dean touch him. It was a tender touch, one done with the tip of a finger. Dean traced around where the bloodstain had been darkest on Cas’s shirt, eliciting a shiver, and chose to bite his tongue no more.

"How did you die?"

Cas let his shirt fall like curtains at an interval, and turned back to Dean with an oddly serene expression.

He hummed before he answered, “The news said I had been stabbed, but I do not entirely recall. Of course, my body was in shock, so I didn’t feel it, but I remember my shirt soaking with something I couldn’t place, which I suppose is why I have a bloodstain but no scar.”

"So you didn’t see who killed you," Dean said slowly, the cogs turning in his head.

"No. Dean, can we -"

"Do you wanna know who killed you?"

Cas sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Not particularly.”

"But -"

"Dean. I would just like to spend time with you while I am still able to. What I would  _not_  like to do, however, is rehash my death.”

Castiel was all tense, something Dean had immediately grown to hate, as well as the fact the he had put that tension in those muscles. He nodded almost imperceptibly and held his hands up by way of apology, meeting Cas’s hard eyes with his beseeching ones.

His beseeching eyes caught a hint of red at Cas’s ribs. It wasn’t something Dean could ignore, so he tugged at the grey material and asked, “Can you at least put on a different shirt?”

Cas gave him that tiny adorable smile again as his features relaxed, and they moved to Dean’s bedroom, where Dean rifled through his drawers until he found the perfect shirt for Cas to wear.

"Here," he grinned, holding it up. "This is perfect."

The shirt was scrutinized by wary eyes and furrowed brows.

"I am  _not_  wearing that if that is who I think it is.”

Five minutes and a scuffle later, Cas was wearing a shirt with  _Casper The Friendly Ghost_ printed on the front, and a pout that could rival a supermodel’s.

As they caught their breaths on the corner sofa, Dean switched on the TV and let Cas dictate the channel. While Cas marvelled at  _Planet Earth_ , his hand lingered over Dean’s leg, and it did not go unnoticed.

"Uhh… Cas?"

Cas pulled his gaze away from the screen. “Yes?”

"Why is your hand hovering over my thigh like it’s some kind of helicopter?"  _And if my thigh’s a helipad, why ain’t you landing?_  is what Dean didn’t add.

"Oh." Cas snatched his hand to his lap and looked away, embarrassed. "I, um, used to do that when I was a ghost - not that I’m not a ghost now. Because I couldn’t touch you. And because… because you seemed contented by it."

Dean raised an eyebrow. “I was happier with your hand hovering over my leg?”

"It wasn’t just your leg; sometimes it would be your shoulder, or your head if you were laying down, but yes, you were happier. You smiled sometimes, and I prefer you smiling."

Taking Cas’s hand back, Dean placed it on his leg and smiled wide, keeping his fingers on the verge of threading with Castiel’s but never quite allowing them to do so. It was strange, being able to watch TV with Cas without  _thirteens_  and  _fourteens_ and not getting to say  _'I swear to God, Cas, if you turn the set off one more time I'm gonna kill myself and beat your punk ass!_ _’_  whenever the ghost didn’t get his way. 

Not _the_  ghost _,_ Dean thought, _his_  ghost.

He rolled his head to the side to stare slow-blinkingly at Cas’s profile. “You know,” Dean said playfully, poking Cas in the belly, “I only bought that shirt ‘cause it made me think of you. Castiel, my friendly ghost. Never thought you’d ever be wearin’ it, though.”

“ _You_ _r_ friendly ghost?”

"Hey, you live in my apartment, man, you’re my ghost."

"You live in  _my_  apartment, you’re my… my… alive person.”

Dean snorted. Settling into the cushions to watch Cas’s apparent favourite show (who knew the guy was such a geek?), he shuffled closer to his friendly ghost and finally interlaced their fingers, not missing the way Cas leaned into him.

The skin-on-skin contact and the television didn’t distract Dean for long. He wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but he needed to understand why this had happened,  _how_  it had happened, and if he was going to wake up tomorrow with nothing but the bad taste in his mouth of a really great - and heartbreaking - dream.

He burrowed his face into Cas’s neck as he started to drift off, hoping that the more he could breathe in and feel of his friend, the more would be there in the morning. It was flawed logic, but as blunt fingernails lightly scratched the back of his head, Dean was positive that Cas would stay solid for him for as long as he could.


	4. Chapter 4

Cas was still there when he woke up.

More importantly, Cas was  _in his bed_ when he woke up, curled up against Dean and snuffling softly. Who knew ghosts could sleep? If Cas still _was_ a ghost, that was.

They were both still in yesterday's clothes, which was hardly surprising on Cas's part, seeing as the guy had spent his whole ghost existence in the same outfit, but Dean was surprised at himself, having recently discovered a love of lounge wear. And as he didn't remember actually  _going_  to bed, there was only one explanation: Cas had carried him from the couch to the bed, tucked him in, and then conked out right next to him.

For someone who was supposed to be a ghost, Cas was pretty strong.  

Castiel's little sleepy huffs tickled Dean's neck, and it reminded him of the glaringly obvious fact that the ghost was actually part human now, judging by his abilities to sleep, touch, and breathe, and how they needed to get to the bottom of it. After all, people didn't just come back to life.

Unless they were zombies. Which Cas obviously wasn't.

Right?

Dean went from quietly chuckling at the thought of Cas being a zombie to panicking at the same thought within a second. What if Cas wanted to eat his brain?

He shook Cas lightly, jogging him from whatever ghosts or zombies dreamt about, and grunted his name until he woke up.

Cas stretched and wiggled his hips into the mattress, only to curl up again and cuddle the pillow with an easy smile. "That," he yawned, "was the best I have slept in years."

When Dean didn't reply with anything, Cas opened an eye and asked, "Do you get it? Because that is the first I have slept in years?"

"Dork," Dean muttered fondly, then cutting to the extremely urgent chase with, "Are you a zombie?"

Indecipherable blue eyes bore into his. "Yes, Dean, and if you know what is best for your delicious brain, you will let me go back to sleep."

"Ha Ha. Sarcasm, that's a new one for you."

"I'd say stupidity is a new one for you, but..."

Dean made an offended noise and cuffed Cas round the ear. "You're mean in the morning."

"And you are apparently very dense in the morning," Cas retorted, adding, "which I already knew."

"How do you know I'm stupid in the mornings?" Dean asked, intrigued.

"Four out of seven days, you put a garment of clothing on either backwards, inside out, or over your night wear, and three out of seven days, you forget how the coffee machine works."

Cas had a point. Mornings weren't exactly when Dean was at his peak. And seeing as it was currently morning, he wasn't even near the correct state to question how or why Castiel's statistics were so accurate. Instead, he closed his eyes and pulled the covers up to his chin, and let his mind wonder the possibilities of how Cas came to be.

 _Well, when a mommy and a daddy love each other very much, they_ -

He cut off the high obnoxious voice of mockery in his head, preferring not to think of Cas's parents sharing a special hug, or special hugs at all for that matter, especially when it had been too damn long since he'd 'hugged' anything but his right hand, and when there was a warm body in his bed.

But back to how Cas came to be... again.

Dean nudged him, hoping he hadn't fallen asleep again. Even though Cas hadn't slept in yonks, that wasn't an excuse to go all Sleeping Beauty on him. Making a mental note to quit referencing Disney all together (what could he say, there was something about Castiel that evoked animated feelings in him), Dean nudged Cas again, eliciting a grunt.

"What?" Cas growled.

"Okay, Grumpy, cool it," said Dean, immediately rewriting his previous mental note. "Thing is, we need to figure out how you got here, how you came back or why you were sent back. And like, are you still part ghost? Can you eat? Can you leave the apartment? Can you still mess with the appliances and the electricity?"

Castiel thought for a moment. "I don't know the answer to any of those questions," he said flatly.

"Then we need to figure them out! Come on, Saturday is a day for experimenting!"

"No, Saturday is a day for _sleeping_."

Dean recognised that from somewhere, he was sure of it... Charlie said it sometimes, and it's not like they said that in Game of Thrones or The Hobbit, so it must have been one of the shows she watched as a guilty pleasure. He thought a little more on it, cross-referencing within seconds the quotes he had heard Charlie make and seen Cas write, and finally he had it.

"...Do you watch New Girl when I'm at work?" he asked, almost incredulously.

"I like Furguson."

Of course Cas's favourite character was a cat.

Dean rolled his eyes. "Come on, roomfriend," he said, shrugging off the warmth of the duvet, "let's do some ghost science."

And ghost science they did. They tried the basics first, like eating and drinking, but Cas had difficulty lifting his knife and fork ( _"How heavy is your cutlery, Dean?"_ a disgruntled Cas had asked), and gripping the water glass ( _"It's far too greasy, I suggest changing your brand of dishwasher tablets."_ ), and not long after he had cajoled Dean into feeding him a few bites of a pancake, he was in the bathroom, moaning, "I don't think I have a functioning digestive system... It went straight through me... ugh."

"Dude! Did _not_ need to know that!" Dean grimaced. Still, more pancakes for him.

Next on the list was leaving the apartment. Or trying to leave the apartment, anyway. Cas had bounced right back from the doorframe like it was an invisible trampoline and landed flat on his ass. Laughing, Dean stood in the hallway, taunting his friend through the barrier - a ploy that only led them to the discovery that Cas could still manipulate electricity, as he got frustrated enough to dim the corridor lights and turn the coffee machine to the 'growling espresso' setting. After playing with Cas's _Thor_ powers awhile longer (minus the super strength - Dean was pretty sure Thor could lift a knife and fork), they decided on the final task of the day: Seeing whether Castiel was visible to those other than Dean.

Of course, since Cas couldn't leave the apartment, that meant that they could only test it one way. Via the internet. Omegle, to be more specific.

They only planned to stay on there for a couple of minutes, just to be sure that they could or couldn't see the half-ghost, but ended up staying on the website for an hour upon ticking off ' _Can others see Cas'_   on the list. There were an abundance of dicks, which Cas was surprised, horrified, and weirdly fascinated by, and a lot of twelve year olds, too, sometimes girls asking them to kiss on cam, and sometimes boys with meme shirts on.

Cas asked one boy what a meme was and was immediately declared a 'fag troll' in a prepubescent voice, and that's when Dean abruptly closed the lid of the laptop.

"No one calls you a fag, even if they do sound hilarious," he sternly told Cas.

"If you say so," replied a quiet Cas. "But I still don't know what a meme is."

Dean's mood immediately lifted again at the sincerity of Cas's words, before it clouded as _'and I still don't know why someone would want to kill you'_ crossed his mind.

Perhaps Cas would talk about it now, now that they had bonded more over laughing at strangers' dicks.

"Hey, Cas?" he started with trepidation. "Why would someone wanna kill you?"

Calm as the sea before a storm, Cas looked at him for a moment before he answered with, "Most likely because I was involved with the Leviathans."

 _Leviathans._ Dean blanched at the name. The last time he had heard that word spoken had been at the funeral of his adoptive father.

And Castiel was involved with them.


	5. Chapter 5

Anger simmered below Dean’s skin, his blood pounding with a four beat rhythm and whispering  _Le-vi-a-than_ through his veins with unceasing determination. A muscle jumped in his upper lip and threatened to pull his mouth into a snarl, but Dean contained it, if only to spare the coffee table from being flipped.

He didn’t understand. How could Castiel be involved with a… a… the word ‘gang’ seemed too trivial for what the Leviathans were to Chicago, and for how they appeared to run the city and half the state of Illinois. In the courtroom, Dick Roman ( _the dick_ ) had always described them as a business, but no business, no matter how corrupt they were, stole and murdered and blackmailed quite like the Leviathans did.

Evenly, but with a clenched jaw, he asked, “You were in with the Leviathans?”

"Yes, and I know how it must sound, but -"

"They shot my dad. Bullet to the head." Dean tapped his temple, his voice distant and clipped, his eyes anywhere but on Castiel. "He died at the hospital. They tried, but in the end, there was nothing they could do."

Cas’s horrified face disappeared into his hands. He shook his head in shame, and after a few moments of indulging the silence, Castiel looked at Dean with honest eyes and hoped they could convince. "Dean, I - I am so sorry, truly I am. Everything I did, it was meant to prevent them from doing all the awful things that Roman and Crowley had enabled, and I failed and died in the process, and for that..." He trailed off as the words came out all broken and swallowed the rest of the sentence as Dean tried to piece it all together.

Castiel had initially said that he was involved with the Leviathans, but now he was saying that he had been... what, trying to stop them? Did he die trying to take them down, as Bobby did? The anger pumping through Dean dulled as confusion took hold, and he could almost feel the question marks radiating from the top of his head. Sam liked to joke that everything came back to food with Dean, and in this case, he'd be correct, as Dean would need everything laid out in front of him before he could consume it.

The question marks were soon joined by the sound of cogs turning, and Dean wanted to know everything but he could quite figure out where to start. Was Cas part of a crime ring? Did he lead it? Did he ever kill anyone? Was he murdered by the people he had turned his back on? There were a dozen more questions in his mind and on his lips, but a crestfallen Cas cut in with one first.

"What was your father's name?"

Dean answered automatically, glad he didn't have to think too hard. "Bobby, Bobby Singer."

"Bobby Singer?" Cas echoed.

"Yeah, I know, different last names. I mean, technically he's my adoptive dad, Sam's too, but he wanted us to keep the Winchester name goin', even if he had no mini Singers himself."

"No, I mean, yes, but I knew Bobby. We were working together, he was the detective who went undercover and joined the Leviathans so we could take them down from the inside - I had no idea that they had killed him, I am so sorry. He was a very brave man. A good man." If Cas still had body functions, Dean was pretty sure that he'd see the guy welling up.

All of his remaining anger and confusion dissipated into the tense air around them, and in that moment, they weren't a poor excuse of a ghost and a man who had more issues than he had fingers - they were just two people belatedly mourning the loss of a good man.

Dean sidled closer to Cas and rubbed his back instinctively, his need to comfort and protect kicking in, and divulged the details of his father's death, partly in the hope that he might get a little something back. "It was Roman who shot him, he kept saying so in the ambulance, but the court wrote it off as 'delirium'." He refrained from scoffing, and his hand unconsciously settled over where Cas's stab wound should be, his thumb rubbing little circles around it.

"When did it happen?" Cas asked, his voice as soft as the light of the dusk.

"Probably 'bout the same time they offed you."

Wrinkles appeared between Castiel's eyebrows and around his eyes, making the face that Dean had come to know as his 'scrunchy-thinking-face', and he quickly said, "I don't know for certain that it was them, but -"

"Cas. Come on. You've watched cop shows with me. You ever hear them talking about motives?"

Cas nodded.

"If the Leviathans knew about my dad, then they probably figured that he had a partner in crime. Or a partner in law, in your case. So Roman offed him, then someone else in the gang did you in. The Leviathans had a motive to kill you, is what I'm trying to say."

Cas nodded again, slower this time, as he mulled it all over. It seemed that they both had some mulling to do, Dean thought, mulling that would be best done with someone else present, maybe someone who knew what to do with this whole thing - whatever the whole thing was.

He only thought for a second more before he asked, "Do you mind if I give Sam a text? Maybe if he was here, he'd know what to do with... you know, yours and Dad's murders, and the Leviathans, and whatever. Am I making sense?"

At the mention of Sam's name, Cas's face lit up.  _What a surprise._

"Yes, that would be best, I think. He will know what to do."

Dean hummed. Though he knew little of what had really gone on behind the Leviathan's closed doors, he knew that something had to be done - to get a little more closure with Bobby's death, at least, and for Cas to get the closure he needed to move onto the next life.

He froze and retracted his hand from behind Castiel, sinking into the back of the couch shortly after with an unreadable expression.

"Is this your unfinished business?"

It came out sadder than he meant it to, and Dean was suddenly aware of the downturn of his lips. They wouldn't lift again no matter how much he silently demanded it, nor would his limbs; he felt so sluggish it was as though his whole self was smothered in molasses. Dean could only dart his eyes around until they found Cas, who appeared to be in a similar situation.

Cas swallowed thickly. "Most likely."

"And after? What happens then?"

"The afterlife, I suppose, if there is one."

"There has to be." Dean frowned, reasoning, "You wouldn't be stuck here if there weren't something to move on to, right?"

"Right," said Cas, flatly and distantly.

During the natural pause, Dean shot a text to his little brother, very loosely explaining that there might be new evidence for the Roman case, though he needed a lawyer brain to figure it out. He didn't expect an immediate response, knowing sometimes Sam worked late, and that when he didn't he liked to spend time with his girlfriend, so pocketed his phone and hoped he'd get a reply by the morning. 

He poked Cas with his foot, jolting him out of a daydream, and without thinking, Cas kept Dean's foot in his lap, resting his hand over the top of it. 

Dean also kind of hoped that maybe he wouldn't get a reply by morning, that Sam would be too bogged down with a case to answer his text. Though it was important, there was a selfish part of Dean that wanted Cas's business to stay unfinished, so he could stick around a little longer. He'd just got Cas, a Cas he could see and touch, Dean didn't want him to disappear again, especially if the next time was for forever.

Which is why he had to cherish the time he had now.

"Tell me about your life," he half-asked like a child wanting a bedtime story.

"My life when I was alive, or my life after?"

"Either's good."

Cas tapped his fingers on Dean's foot. "I'll tell you about my life after I died, it'll be shorter."

And so Castiel told him of the previous tenants who never lasted because he accidentally scared them away, and how it took him weeks to build up the courage to get in contact with Dean, because he didn't want to scare him away too. He told Dean of the loneliness he felt, of how exhausting it was to write in the mirror sometimes but how he could never sleep, of how he couldn't help setting off all the appliances because of how excited he was to see Dean again, of how listening to him talk was the best part of his day.

It was Dean's turn to listen now, to listen to that uniquely rough voice and watch Cas as he idly played with Dean's toes, to hear him speak softer as the night wore on and see his eyelids droop with the sleep they should probably both be getting.

Eventually, Cas finished talking, and he switched on the television in lieu of sleep, flicking through the nature channels. The long day showed on Cas's face, and Dean made his move for the bedroom, hoping it would encourage Cas to remember that he actually needed to sleep now.

"I'm gonna hit the hay," he said, stretching his arms above his head and hearing a satisfying  _click_  in his back. "Coming with? Or you can sleep on the couch, if you want."

Cas watched him as he stood, something Dean couldn't read dawning on his face. "Yes, I'll share the bed with you, Dean. I'd like to watch the rest of this, however." He gestured to the screen, where a flower was blooming in time-lapse film.

With a tiny nod, Dean murmured a dulcet, “Goodnight,” and without prior thought, bent down and kissed Cas on the forehead, brushing the tip of his nose with pursed lips when Cas tilted his head back to look up at Dean with wide eyes.

"Goodnight," Cas said in return, pushing himself up a few inches to press his lips to Dean’s in a brief, chaste kiss.

Straightening up in only one sense of the word, Dean cleared his throat and smiled bashfully, unable to ignore Cas’s smug, knowing look.

"Uhh… If you're not taking the couch, I’ll… see you in there?" He hitched a thumb towards the bedroom.

Cas nodded, a hint of a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Yes, I’ll see you in there.”

"O-okay. Night, Cas." With that, Dean stumbled out of the lounge and into his bed, his heavy eyelids resting and his lips in a dopey grin, and for some reason, the last thing on his mind was the sound of a spinning pottery wheel.

Dean gradually came to from his dreams, a sleepy smile on his face when he remembered how welcomed his absent-minded goodnight kiss was. He rolled on the spot and wandered a hand out to feel for Cas, but it found nothing, not even a warm spot. Frowning, Dean rubbed his eyes open and found Cas kneeling at the foot of the bed with wist in his blue eyes, and immediately the crease between his brows was ironed out.

"Hey," said Dean softly. "How’re you -"

Dean’s heart stumbled in his chest.

"Shit, Cas!" he breathed. Not only could he see Cas, but he could also see everything directly behind Cas, too. 

"You’re… I can - I can see -"

"I know," Cas said with a sad smile.

"You can see right through me."


	6. Chapter 6

The ghost aspect of Cas was far more prominent now that Dean could see right through his chest to the  _Star Wars_  poster behind him. He wanted to quote Luke and say that it was  _impossible,_  but the reasoning was there. It made sense that Castiel was near invisible again because when they had shared a kiss the night before, Dean felt the same jolt of energy as when he had touched his ghost hand and brought him back into a solid state.

He almost wanted to touch Cas again, to see if the third time would be the charm to keep him almost human, but the sinking feeling in his gut anchored him to the bed while despondent thoughts bubbled to the surface of his mind.

"What happened?" he asked, albeit pointlessly. It was no doubt his own fault.

Cas managed a shrug. "I am not entirely sure. I came in here to sleep, found that I couldn't, and then realised that I was... well, that I was transparent."

"Did it hurt?"

"No," said Cas, his concerned features softening. "My body felt duller, but it was not painful."

That was good. So long as it didn't hurt Cas, Dean could be fine with it. Or try to be fine with it, anyway.

 _Ahh, screw it_. In no way could Dean be  _fine_  with losing the closest thing he had to a best friend when he'd just got him, and especially when Dean had just realised that he wanted to kiss the shit out of him. 

He'd have to text Jo and very vaguely explain the situation to her. She'd know what to do.

With that in mind, Dean retrieved his phone from the bedside table and unlocked it, only to find that he'd received five texts, a missed call, and a voicemail message, all from Sam.  _Oops_ , thought Dean, reading the first message.  _Shit,_  thought Dean, scrolling through the increasingly urgent texts and listening to the voicemail. He blanched and gulped and nervously licked his lower lip as he raised his eyes to a very curious Cas.

"Uhh... My brother's on his way here. E.T.A now."

"Sam's visiting us?" Cas asked, perking up, but he immediately deflated before he repeated, "Oh, Sam's visiting us." 

"Yeah." Dean sucked a breath in through his teeth. "I guess you'll have to wait in here while he's over."

Cas furrowed his brow, and taken aback, he said, "You're going to lie to your brother about me? Even more so? I understood why before, but now, it matters that he knows I exist."

"What else am I supposed to do? You can't exactly shake his hand, Casper, and I'm pretty sure Sam stopped believing in things that go bump in the night a long time ago."

"I hardly go 'bump in the night'," Cas said haughtily. He folded his arms, his body stiffening in defence, and he looked resolved to say nothing more unless Dean gave him his way.

Dean sighed defeatedly. "I  _guess_  it makes sense if you're here to tell Sam what you know. But two rules: One, you don't do a Becky Rosen, okay? Sam's a normal, nerdy guy who just works out a lot. Nothing special."

Cas snorted as he remembered the tale he had heard of Sam's date-turned-stalker, though pinned Dean with a dubious look on hearing 'nothing special'. 

Shooting a self-satisfied smirk at Cas ( _What? It was good to know that that story hadn't got old for him either_ ), Dean continued with the second rule. "And uh, two, I don't really want Sam to know about the  _us_  of it all, so can you not tell him about - about last night?"

"The us of it all," repeated Cas with a slow blink.

"Yeah." 

It fell so silent that Dean thought he could hear the ticking of his digital alarm clock - of course, that may have been the gears working in Cas's head - but finally, when the creaky cogs had stopped churning, Castiel nodded, and said a simple, "Alright."

Dean stared at the ghost across from him for a few long moments. No matter how hard he envisioned Cas as whole, he still stayed as see through as the face of Jor-El in Superman's Fortress of Solitude. At least Cas wasn't a floating head. That was literally the only upside Dean could find.

His mouth opened to ask Cas a thousand questions to which he knew Cas had no answer to, so he immediately shut it, and tried not to look to forlorn about their predicament.

Only his mouth was a rebellious bastard, and it blurted:

"I'm really freaking glad you're not a floating head."

"Um... so am I?"

Cas's confused gaze set Dean off into a fit of laughter, one only remedied by a voice in the back of his mind saying,  _that's it,_ _laugh through the pain._  

"I still have no idea why I would be a floating head," Cas grumbled, which only elicited a few more strangely melancholy chuckles from Dean.

Tonight, if Cas was still more ghost than human and therefore less likely to sleep, Dean would set him up with all the Superman films, even the bad ones. And maybe he'd try to stay up and watch them too, but would either be too tired to keep his eyes open for all of them, or would be too dejected to sit there for hours on end without touching Cas at all. And yeah, maybe Cas would do that thing where he hovered his hand over Dean's arm or leg, but it wouldn't be the same.

"Dean?"

The distant call of his name brought him out of his daydream.  _Damn_. He made a pact with Sam to never get caught up in the past, but getting caught up in the future was a whole other thing.

"Dean, the door went. I think Sam's here." Cas sheepishly held up his hands to look at Dean through them. "I don't think I can open the door."

Collecting himself, Dean made for the front door, shucking on a dressing gown and almost walking through Cas on the way. He murmured an apology, but Cas waved it off. Apparently it wouldn't have been the first time Dean had passed through him.

The doorbell chimed again (A feature Cas had added when he was the tenant of the apartment - apparently the usual buzz startled him too much.  _Who knew Cas was so precious?_ Dean had thought when he had learnt that) and under his breath, Dean said, "Yeah, I'm comin', I'm comin'."

He buzzed his little brother into the building, and opened the door in readiness for the overgrown puppy of a man to bound in - and bound in Sam did, his eager hazel eyes lighting up when they found Dean leaning on the back of the couch.

"Hey! I came as soon as I got your text, and then you didn't reply to any of mine, so I got worried, and -" Sam's fast speech stopped entirely and his eyes widened as they found Cas, too, who wandered forward from where he had been lurking.

Recognition sparked on Sam's staggered expression. "Holy shit, you're Castiel Novak! You're meant to be dead!"

Dean looked between his brother and his ghost, both of them trading confusion and astonishment between their eyes. Hoping to lighten the mood a little, he said, "Something Cas is painfully aware of, I'm sure." He took a second to grin at his own wit, and then carried out the formalities.

"Cas, as you know, this is my brother Sam, and Sam, as you kinda know, this is my roommate Cas. He's also a ghost in his spare time."

 


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait, this update took longer than usual! I did a ton of research, but probably not enough, so feel free to correct me on anything I've gotten wrong.

Sam blinked at the ghost before him, and then looked at Dean with one hell of a face. He tried to speak, but only croaky noises made it past the tie of his tongue.

"Hello Sam," Cas said, barely managing to control himself. His ridiculously pretty eyes were sparkling, even in their transparency, and his whole body seemed to be fizzing with excitement at the sight of Sam. 

Suppressing jealousy, Dean wondered if Cas always reacted that way when Sam came round. 

"Yeah, Cas is a big fan of yours. No idea why." Dean rolled his eyes and hoped that he didn't sound as seething as he was feeling.

But still, Sam said nothing.

"Okay, so I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that you need a little time to adjust to the whole ghost thing. You just keep doin' your goldfish impression while me 'n' Cas tell you what you're doin' here."

"Um, hello, Sam. I'm Castiel." Cas awkwardly stuck out his hand, and only when Dean gave him an incredulous look and mouthed  _he already knows that_  did Cas fluster and pretend that he was going the long way around to itch his head. Unlike Sam's staring ones, his eyes were nervously darting all over the place as he explained, "I was murdered, as you obviously know, and we need your help to solve who killed me. I need to know, otherwise I can't move on."

When Castiel mentioned moving on to the next life, Dean kept a steely façade. Not having Cas around the apartment still sat ill in his stomach. It seemed that a kiss was all he could have, which was better than nothing, but if he couldn't have Cas in the flesh, then he wanted Cas in whatever form he took. See through or completely invisible, Dean didn't mind, just so long as he had Cas around. 

 _The 'us' of it all._ That's what Dean had called it mere minutes ago. How could he let himself be an 'us' when he was just going to be an 'I' soon, after Cas had moved on? Because as selfish as Dean was being when he wanted his ghost to stick around, he wouldn't stop him if he wanted to go. He'd just be a little heartbroken, that's all, and only probably for the rest of his life. Not a big deal.

So he sucked it up and said, "So how 'bout it, Sammy? Up for playing Nancy Drew?"

Sam shook his head, nodded, fell ass-first into the chair by the door, and then said, "I think I need to sit down."

"He's already sitting down," Cas stage-whispered to Dean.

"No duh," Dean stage-whispered right back before approaching his little brother as he would a scared moose calf. Not that Dean would ever come across a moose calf in his life - Canada was hardly somewhere he planned on visiting. 

"Sam?" he gently called, not wanting to startle the poor moose calf. When his little brother finally started looking at him and not just through him, that was when Dean took the initiative and started talking.

"Cas is dead. He was murdered. Obviously you know that. But he's not really sleeping with the fishes, he's just napping with them, if you know what I mean, and we think that he can only join the invisible choir if we close the case on his murder. Possibly Bobby's, too, but we're not sure. He was Bobby's inside man when he was taking down the Leviathans, did you know that?"

Dean figured that if he asked Sam a question, it would encourage him to speak, or at least acknowledge that he was listening.

It worked.

"No, I didn't. I didn't know about the Bobby thing. I mean, we knew he was working with someone on the inside, but we never knew who it was. Or is it whom it was?"

 _Uh oh._ Dean's little-brother-about-to-ramble senses started to tingle as said little brother debated whos and whoms under his breath with a restless hand combing through his hair, and anything he could do to ease the Sam-rambles eluded him, so he looked to Cas for help. It had been so long since Dean had first freaked out about the ghost haunting his apartment, and he couldn't remember how Cas had explained it to him in a way that didn't send Dean running to the _For Rent_ ads.

And of course Cas would try his best to help by saying, "I think it's 'whom'."

"Yeah, yeah, whom, that makes sense," Sam said, his blinks as rapid as the leafs in page flip art.

Seeing as the men in his life were apparently completely useless, Dean rolled his eyes so far into his head he saw his short-circuiting brain, and took control.

"Okay, that's it. We're playing Twenty Questions."

A flick switched in Sam's head, and finally, he started making sensical sentences with his goldfish mouth, and began asking quickfire questions.

"Um... So Cas is a ghost?"

"Yeah."

"Like... your roommmate Cas?"

"The very same, Sammy."

"And this is him?"

"Yep. Say hi again, Cas."

"Hi again, Cas," the ghost dryly piped up.

Dean snorted. "Smartass."

"And he's been a ghost this whole time?"

"Yeah, pretty much, but he's never been visible up until a couple'a days ago."

"Okay." Sam nodded continuously, his hair flopping in his face over and over again like a perfectly looped GIF. Then, very quickly, he leapt to his feet, stuck out a hand, and with a wild gaze said, "It's good to meet you, Castiel."

Cas stared at the opaque hand before him before waving his own pellucid one almost apologetically.

Horror struck Sam's face. "Oh God, I'm so sorry, that was really insensitive of me!"

"It's fine, really," said Castiel with a small, placating smile. "It's very good to meet you too, finally."

Dean looked between the both of them. The silence that followed their belated greeting was unsettling, like something was brewing on the horizon, and it wasn't a comforting feeling - especially when his brother and his maybe-love-interest-who-also-happened-to-be-a-ghost had just met. To scare off the awkward elephant in the room, Dean puffed out his cheeks and squelched the air through his teeth, all while picking at his nails.

Sam pulled out his laptop from the bag that had dropped to the floor the moment he realised who Dean's roommate was, and powered it up. "I guess we should talk about the case," he said, alarmingly calmer than he had been a few minutes ago. "Dean, you can leave if you're gonna keep picking your nails and making dumb noises."

Affronted, Dean sat a little straighter, while Cas hid a smile. All the same, he clasped his hands together and sucked his lips in. Dean didn't want to miss this.

"I suppose I should start at where your father came into the equation, and everything will become as clear as... well, as clear as I am as I explain everything that happened." Castiel swallowed and glanced nervously at the brothers intermittently.  "It all started with the anonymous tips."

  _Lieutenant Jody Mills jogged to Captain Singer's office and knocked twice on the open door._

_"Come in," he grunted, not looking up from the paperwork he so abhorred doing._

_"Captain, we just got an anonymous tip that the Leviathans are planning a hit on the Children's Hospital."_

_He looked up then, horror stricken. "Lurie? The Hell kinda sick bastards are they?"_

_Mills grimaced. "They're Leviathans, sir. They're as sick as they come."_

_"I want you down there_ now. _Take Fitzgerald, Masters, and Laffitte with you, and tell Fitzgerald he can take his damn puppet, too. I'll send the SWAT team down as soon as I get the all clear from the BOC. Did we get a trace on the caller?"_

_"No sir, we couldn't keep him on the line."_

_The Lieutenant made to leave, but Bobby beckoned her into his office. "I don't want Bell anywhere near this case, you hear me?"_

_She nodded. "Yes sir."_

_"Good. Now git. I expect to see those sons of bitches cuffed, and if they ain't, you'll be the one facing the disciplinary."_

_Mills nodded once more, and Bobby made the call to Bureau Chief Turner to send down the SWAT team before pouring himself a double. He was in for a long night._

_By the end of it, they had charged and arrested more criminals than they had the past few weeks combined._

_When the tipper called for the fifth time and led them to arrest more Leviathans than their cells could handle, that's when Bobby demanded that the anonymous man be put through to him the next time he called._

_The man's voice was so deep, Bobby thought he was using a modulator at first. But after talking to him a few times, he figured that the guy was a heavy smoker who spent too much on cigarettes to buy a modulator, which in Bobby's eyes, was impressive in itself. The anonymous tipper had balls enough to use his real voice, even if he wouldn't use his real number to call, or provide a name._

_The longest Bobby kept him on for was fifty seconds - still not enough to trace the call, but enough to know that this man was in deep shit, to put it lightly._

__

_Bell wanted to bring someone in to interview, one of Roman's college buddies. Richard Roman was the prime suspect for the head of the Leviathans and notoriously difficult to get into the station to interview. He was too slimy with far too good connections, so any call for his head was dropped, and they had to resort to bringing in people who could give any evidence for or against his case._

_He had to hand it to Bell. Weeks behind a desk and she got irritable enough to prove herself outside of her fieldwork. Then again, that is what Bobby had hoped. He couldn't have her in the field, what with her personal vendetta against the Leviathans, so he stuck her in the corner with a computer, a phone, and a mountain of paperwork, and hoped that her drive for revenge would push her to find something solid enough to leave Roman no other choice but to prove his innocence._

_Roman's college friend was a one Castiel Novak, the founder of The Clarence Trust, a charity that rehabilitated the homeless of Illinois. According to Bell's research, they were roommates who stayed friends long after college, and Roman was even a benefactor to The Clarence Trust. He had made appearances at all of the charity's events, and was always seen to be in cahoots with Castiel there._

_Bobby decided to throw Bell a bone, seeing as this was all down to her hard work._

_"You can lead the interview, but I want Fitzgerald in there with you, and I'll be observing from behind the two-way."_

_Bell groaned. "You want Fitzgerald in there? Captain, with all due respect, the last time I saw him interview a civilian, he played good-cop-bad-cop with Mr Fizzles. And Mr Fizzles was bad cop."_

_With a snort, Bobby said, "Sounds about right. But I still want him in there -_ without _Mr Fizzles. You could teach that boy a thing or two about interviewing, so be on your best behaviour, and you might earn yourself a gold star."_

_He threw the both of them out the interview room when Bell asked Novak to confirm his name and date of birth.  
_

_"Well put me in a dress and call me Susie, if it ain't our anonymous tipper._ "

_Castiel froze. He hadn't anticipated that Captain Singer would be here.  
_

_"So, Castiel Novak, founder of The Clarence Trust... How is it that you know when and where the Leviathans are gonna be?"_

_Cas said nothing, instead choosing to eye the security cameras with suspicion. Calling was one thing, but openly talking about it and being recorded? There was no question that the system was corrupt, but he had no idea how far it went._

_"Your buddy Dick bragging?" prodded Bobby._

_The whole reason Castiel called Captain Singer's precinct was because he was absolutely sure that they were the most just in all of Chicago, and he was happy to give information under the guise of Dick Roman's college friend, but now that he had been made as the tipper, his strings were far more tangled than before. He looked the Captain in his beady eyes, and selected his words carefully._

_"I recently learned that his part in my charity is a front for how he recruits new members of the Leviathans," Cas said bitterly. "More than half of the homeless we are rehabilitating are actually given shelter and food in return for their loyalty to him."_

_"And it's definitely Roman, the head of the Leviathans?" Saying their whole name took too damn long, Bobby thought. They needed to come up with some sort of shorthand that didn't sound like a denim store._

_"Definitely," Castiel replied. "But he has a business partner - Crowley. I've never seen him, but I do know that he has ordered the kills of many people, and that his speciality is blackmail. Apparently, that was the way he won Dick's favour - by bringing him a muffin basket and a business proposal."_

_Bobby scratched his chin. "Crowley... never heard of him. Do you think you can get evidence of them being behind all the Leviathan crimes?"_

_"I can do better than that," promised Castiel. "Roman's offered me a job."_

__

_It was a two man job, they decided. And though it was unorthodox to send a Captain undercover, Bobby was definitely the man for the job. It wasn't difficult_ _to fake an identity for the Captain. All he needed to to was grow out his beard so it was more on the scraggly side, wear the clothes he kept for when he worked on his car, and create a backstory that led to him winding up homeless._

_"Captain, you realise this means you won't be able to speak to your sons for as long as this takes?" Castiel reminded him gently. Captain Singer had spoken fondly of his sons on occasion, and Castiel had even overheard a phonecall he'd got from them on Father's Day. The man had called them idjits, but he was smiling for the rest of the day._

_"I know, I know," said Bobby irritably. "And don't you think it's time to start callin' me Jim?"_

_The corner of Castiel's lips twitched in a hidden smile. He enjoyed the Captain's company very much. "Jim it is," he said, with a very poor attempt at a subtle wink._

_'Jim' stared at him. "When we're done taking these son of bitches down, I'm introducing you to my eldest. He'd like you very much."_

_"Is this the son who loves pie?"_

_Jim grunted his assent._

_"Yes, I think I'd like him very much too." Of course, there were a great many other things about Bobby's eldest son that Cas knew, but loving pie seemed to be his defining feature. Both of Bobby's sons sounded like fine men, but the elder seemed more Castiel's type. Plus, the younger was straight and 'practically engaged', as Bobby had said, so there was that._

_Yes, once this was all over, Castiel decided that he would very much like to meet the Captain's eldest son._

__

_It took eight months to completely infiltrate the ranks of the Leviathans. Jim had been steadily working his way up, and was granted the pleasure of meeting Dick himself, while Castiel had been working on the sidelines with Crowley, keeping everything under wraps. What neither Roman or Crowley realised though, was that Castiel had been skimming information and sending it to Jim, all the while he did his part in the recruitment section and sent most of the homeless to shelters he knew to be uncorrupted. Crowley's role in the gang was still largely unknown, though Cas knew he kept people quiet and got his own people to deal with the Leviathans who felt like leaving the ranks. They left, alright. Crowley's followers made sure of that._

_It took another three months before they had had enough information to take down the whole operation. All the drug rings, all the organised hits, all the illegal weaponry dealing, it was all coming down. Bobby was going to send the final nail in the coffin to the law firm his son was interning at and to the station, who'd hammer it in, and all Castiel had to do was to act surprised._

_Bobby never made it far enough to even print that nail. However, he did manage to send an encrypted message to his son before a second bullet bit him in the brain._
    
    
    'Been made. Shot by DR. Find CN.'

_Castiel Novak was reported dead in his home just hours later._

__

"So you didn't see or hear anything or anyone when you died?" Sam asked, swallowing hard. Dean felt like he needed to swallow a lump in his throat too. "Not one of Crowley's people, not a Leviathan, not a pair of big yellow eyes?"

Cas frowned at that last one. "No, nothing."

"And when you... left your body, you didn't see your killer leaving?"

"No, I was checking that they hadn't taken my coat."

Sam and Dean shared a look of utter bewilderment and passed invisible question marks between each other. Sticking his neck out and raising his eyebrows, Dean clarified, "Uh, your coat?"

"Yes, my overcoat. It's what I wrapped up any incriminating evidence I had in."

Dean stared at the ghost he once thought of as intelligent while Sam spluttered.

"Cas. Are you saying that you have hard evidence that could put Roman and Crowley away?"

Cas paused. "This is something I should have mentioned before, isn't it?"


	8. Chapter 8

At the reveal of forgotten evidence, Sam fought back a groan while Dean rolled his eyes.

" _Yes_ , Cas, you probably should have mentioned the fact that you have  _hard evidence_ to arrest  _murderers_ before now," he said, thumb and finger massaging his forehead.

"Apologies," mumbled Castiel, queasy with guilt.

Sighing, Sam half-heartedly reassured, "It's fine, really," and got to his feet. "Where's your coat?"

Castiel showed them to the bathroom, which felt exactly like the garbage compactor in _A New Hope_ once Sam was in it, and pointed to the corner of the tub.

"There's a loose tile here." He knelt, stuck his hand through the tile, and wiggled his arm about. Staring up at the blank faces of the brothers, Castiel balked. "What?"

Dean did not change his expression as he lowly asked, "A loose tile? Really? You too good for floorboards?" He bet that the ghost hadn't even thought about condensation.

"Hiding it below a floorboard would be too obvious."

"Yeah, Dean, I thought you'd figure the same," Sam chimed in.

They both looked at Dean, heads tilted, only Sam had that stupid smirk on his face, and Cas was frowning in confusion. Dean thanked the Lord that they weren't wearing the same expressions. That wouldn't put his heavy crush in a very good light. Still, he maturely crossed his arms and pouted.

In a high, mocking voice, he started, " _Yeah Dean I thought you'd figure the_ \- Did ya think about  _condensation_ , smartass? That's gotta have some effect on the papers."

Castiel's face fell, and he half-fell through the tub too. "I didn't think of that."

Though Dean felt a small amount of gratification at being correct, the image of a morose Castiel with Dean's shower gel protruding from his head was not a satisfying one. Not once had Cas thought of how their literally steamy conversations might affect his path to the afterlife. Sam pulled a quick grimace in Dean's direction at the sight, and crouched down so he was eye level with the ghost.

"Cas... You're halfway through the tub, buddy." One of his giant hands hovered around Castiel's shoulder, and it was enough to get him to sit straight. "Let's see how that evidence comes out, yeah?"

Dean watched Cas visibly relax when Sam skirted around touching him, just like how Cas did with Dean. Peculiarly enough, he wasn't jealous; not in the slightest. It was more of a numbing feeling he had, but a slow one, like waiting around outside the dentist's office and losing feeling in your mouth with every minute that passes. Dean watched them with more of an analytical curiosity, removed from the situation as though the ghost in the room was his emotions.

He made a mental note to reciprocate the not-quite-landing of Cas's helicopter hands, though to wait until it was out of Sam's sight. Dean barely knew what was going on between him and Cas, so wouldn't be able to answer any of Sam's questions when it was his turn to host a quickfire round.

Clearing his throat, Dean excused himself to retrieve his toolbox, and left the two of them to talk about a Plan B should the steam have ruined the evidence. Hammer in hand, he returned to find them laughing about something that _Dean wouldn't get_ , apparently. Yeah, because that totally sky-rocketed his self esteem.

With Sam and Cas behind him, now talking about the case again, Dean leaned over the bath and pried off the tile with relative ease, and finally peered into the the makeshift hidey hole. A nearly invisible man and a giant flagged either side of him, and Dean almost felt as though he had retrieved the Holy Grail when he pulled the tan overcoat out. It was slightly damp, and felt warm in his hands, and the three of them exchanged hopeful, doubtful, and inquisitive looks before unwrapping it.

Miraculously, all the evidence was in tact. Luckily, human Castiel had thought to layer it in plastic bags Russian Doll style before shrouding it in his coat. Dean placed the innermost bag in the sink, and one by one, he and Sam pulled out everything their father and Castiel had collected on the Leviathans.

There were more than print outs, which surpassed both of their expectations. There were tapes and transcripts, emails exchanged, photocopies of the contracts Crowley dealt, codes, a code breaker Bobby had made to crack them, USBs Castiel said held everything to do with Roman's involvement with The Clarence Trust, and a multitude of CCTV recordings. It was more than they could have ever hoped for.

Immediately, Sam hot-footed it out of the bathroom to spread out all the evidence on Dean's dining table, leaving the occupants of the apartment in the bathroom.

Dean managed a weak smile. "So, you're one step closer to Heaven, huh?"

Distractedly, Cas nodded. "I forgot I had all of that." 

He scrunched his eyes up and concentrated hard - on what, Dean didn't know, but he soon found out when the ghost squatted and successfully sat on the edge of the tub.

"It's a lot harder for me to sit on inanimate objects," Castiel said, opening his eyes. Voice lower and quieter than usual, he added, "I don't know why."

"Maybe it's 'cause you're not really anything right now. I mean, you're not solid, you're not invisible... Maybe nature's getting confused."

Castiel's lips curved into a small smile at Dean's shrugging logic. "Maybe," he conceded, shrugging himself.

Then, he stiffened, wide-eyed and startled by something Dean couldn't see or hear, and promptly fell through the edge to the bottom of the bath.

The sight of Cas sprawled out like a trapped spider drew a full belly laugh from Dean, and elicited a scowl from the spirit in return. Castiel tried to prop himself up, but the shower mat slipped, and so did he, and eventually he accepted his fate.

"Oh man, I'm sorry, that was just... you're... you..." Dean broke down into laughter again, and wiped a tear from his eye as he calmed himself. With trembling breaths, he noticed that Cas had managed to sit up, and was smiling and shaking his head despite himself.

Still containing his chuckles, Dean asked, "What was that?" 

Castiel scowled again as he stood. "You received a text message."

"Texts mess with your ghosty thing?"

"Not usually."

And it wasn't funny, it really wasn't, but Cas looked so cute when he scowled like that. Dean could see the frustration simmering under Cas's skin, and though he felt sympathy in the recesses of his heart, he also felt a tremendous amount of affection surging within him.

"I'm sorry," he muttered, pressing a kiss to the air above Castiel's forehead.

"Um," Castiel said, biting his lip, and dodging a blush thanks to the stab wound in his back, "it's alright."

Dean hovered his lips around a fading cheek, pecked the air there too, but could not dodge a blush as he was still very much alive.

Their eyes met, and for the first time, they shared a dejected look.

Tearing his gaze away from Castiel, Dean pulled out his phone from his pocket and checked his messages.

**Jo Harvelle**  
Today, 16:48  
_Heeyyyyyyybddean! !!  come drin kwith me! xxcccc_

"Jesus, Jo, it's not even  _five_ ," Dean muttered, storming out of the bathroom and dialling her number. He sighed an apology at Cas, who was trailing behind, and waited for his friend to pick up.

 _"Hey! It's Dean!"_ Jo greeted, loudly enough for Dean to wince and draw back. _"Sorry,"_ she giggled, _"That sure was loud!"_  

"It sure was, sweetheart. Now, why're you drunk before 5pm?"

 _"It's 5pm_ somewhere _, dumbass,"_ Jo replied, and Dean couldn't argue with that.

Jo Harvelle had filled the sibling void Sammy left when he moved out of Illinois. She had applied for work experience at Dean's garage while she completed her last year of college, and from the interview they'd got on like a house on fire. Jo was funny, sweet, knew exactly what she was doing, and took no shit from anyone, a quality Dean greatly admired. Despite whether she passed her exams or not, Dean was taking her on as a full-time mechanic.

 _"Deeeean? Come drink with me? Pleeeeeease? They're on me!"_ she slurred, and just to appease her, Dean agreed, though he had every intention of soberly driving her home.

Dean grabbed his jacket after he hung up, and made his excuses, shooting both of them a look of regret. Too caught up in poring through all the evidence, Sam murmured a distracted 'later' while Cas gave a sad little wave. Dean sighed for what felt like the fiftieth time that day. He wanted nothing more than to kiss Cas goodbye. The same urge had arisen before, but never as strongly as it had then. 

Shyly, Dean checked his brother wasn't watching, and gestured for Cas to come a little closer so Sam wouldn't see the impulse Dean was about to act on. He hid in the frame, blew Castiel a quick kiss, and shut the door in embarrassment before he even saw the beginnings of a reaction.

Jo sought him out as soon as he walked in the bar. She beamed and draped herself around him, pulling the side of his head down to her lips to whisper, "I fff'rgot how to hold my lic-lica- my  _liqueur._ " 

"Oookay," Dean strained as he pulled away to stand at his full height again. Jo was stronger than she looked, the deceptive little thing.

"Don't tell my mom," she mumbled into his chest, hugging him so hard his eyes nearly popped out.

As she eased up, he put a gentle arm around her back, ruffled her hair, and kissed where he had not-quite-kissed Cas earlier.

"I won't, sweetheart. Now, come on, let's get you home."

Jo frowned as she pushed him away. "No. You said you'd drink with me, Winchester, so drink with me!" 

Tugging him towards to bar, Jo shouted for some Purple Nurples, which,  _no_ , Dean was never drinking again, so he chopped the air around his throat and mouthed  _water_ to the bartender. Two glasses of the stuff were placed in front of them as soon as their asses hit the bar stools, and Dean let Jo think it was vodka.

"I finished all my finals to- _hic_ -day!" Jo said after downing her glass. "And Mike broke up with me! Woo!" She threw her hands up before slamming them on the bar.

"Woah, woah, easy there tiger." Gesturing for a refill, Dean turned on his stool to face her directly.

Before he could ask whether she was okay (which she clearly wasn't, judging by the amount of alcohol in her system), Jo hiccuped sadly and slurred, "I only went out with him 'cause he looked like you." Punctuating her last word with a poke to Dean's chest, she swayed and gulped down another water.

"But he  _dumped_ me because  _apparently_  baseball is more important than having - _hic_ \- _sex_ with me. Like, baseball? Really? Who even cares about the stupid Angels? I mean, I'm pretty, right?"

Her big brown eyes shone as her cute little mouth turned downwards, and Dean pulled her in for a quick hug.

"Very pretty, sweetheart. But you're a lot more than pretty," said Dean fiercely, looking her dead in the eye. "You're cool - even if you like REO Speedwagon - you're scary in an awesome way, and you're totally badass."

"I am, aren't I," Jo sniffed, a tiny smile forming.

Dean nodded, and pushed another water towards her.

"And don't think I don't know what this is, Winchester. I'm drunk, but I'm not su-stupid." She winked at him and punched him on the arm. Dean supposed it was meant to be a light, playful punch, but it was hard enough for him to give his bicep a subtle rub.

So Jo liked him. In  _that_ way. Dean could honestly say that he had been clueless up until now. Jo was a little sister to him, a cute little thing who could knock him out with two fingers. Not that that didn't turn him on, it was just that  _Jo_ didn't turn him on. He only wanted to kiss her on the top of her head - anywhere else was  _wrongwrongwrong_. It would be like kissing Sam. Dean grimaced and shook his head to get that image out of his mind, chugging down his own water to cleanse himself of those unintentional thoughts.

"Dean?" Jo said in a small voice, sounding more sober already. "Will you take me home now?"

He put his arm around her shoulders and led her out of the bar, flicking his eyes between the floor and Jo just in case she tripped. Dean sat her in the passenger's side of the Impala, belted her up, and placed her wandering hands in her lap. No one messed with Baby's radio settings.

The drive was silent, mostly, until Jo sleepily mumbled, "Y'know, if you won't bone me, you could at least bone your roommate."

Dean sharply inhaled, tensing. "Cas?"

"Yeah, him. _Cas_. CasCasCas. _'My roommate Cas'._  You talk about him _all_ _the time._  S'nuff ta make a girl jealous."

"Sorry," Dean muttered, not sorry in the least. He wasn't going to say any more on the matter, but after a minute or so thought  _what the Hell_ because Jo was drunk and he needed to talk and she probably wouldn't remember this anyway.

"I uh, I did think something could happen with me 'n' Cas."

"Yeah? But?"

"But no. Um, we kinda slept together - just in the same bed, nothin' dirty - and then there was this kiss... but no. He's leaving soon. For somewhere better." Dean's eyes didn't stray from the road as he spoke. If he didn't blink during his confession, then once he did, he could pretend it never happened.

Jo's lower lip trembled and her eyes shone with tears again. "That's so sad," she quietly whimpered.

Dean blinked.

A weight fell in his lap when they stopped for a red light, and the blonde waves strewn about his legs were what gave Jo away. Gently he set her the right way up, leaned her against the door frame, and grabbed one of his sweaters from the back seat for her head. She let out a high breath when he stroked her head, and Dean smiled fondly. Jo was a pent-up bunny rabbit, only letting him pet her when she was sleepy. 

The rest of the drive was quick, and when they pulled up to Jo's shared house, she was snuffling softly. Dean carried her inside, writing a quick _'call me when you're awake - Dean'_ on a sticky note and tacking it to her forehead after he set her on her bed. No doubt Jo would want to bitch about Michael and celebrate her finals being over when she was sober.

As Dean drove back to his and Cas's place, Dean mused upon the thoughts he was supposed to have forgotten in a blink.  _Cas is leaving soon. For somewhere better._ The words haunted his mind just as Castiel haunted his apartment, but soon both his mind and his place were going to be exorcised, so to speak.

Upon opening his front door, Dean couldn't miss that Sam had redecorated the place with paper cuttings hung on strings. He ducked under the webs, noticing strings for Cas, Bobby, Roman, and Crowley, and another long line Dean saw to be a timeline of events. It reminded him of the giant web of people all connected and joined by Future Hiro in Isaac Mendez's apartment in the TV show _H_ _eroes._

Sitting in the middle of the organised mess was Sam, who was Skyping someone ( _probably his boss,_ Dean thought) while Cas sat off the the side, out of view from the camera. He gave a wry smile to Dean, who gestured to the strings with a cocked eyebrow and held his palms in front of him in a questioning half-shrug.

"Yeah, and get this," Sam said to his laptop, "Roman was at a fundraiser for The Clarence Trust  _while_ Crowley was orchestrating the whole deal. The perfect cover for both of them."

Dean didn't understand what Sam was talking about, but he had that fire in his eyes, and that meant that Sam was right, whatever it was. He trod quietly over to Cas and sat on the carpet next to him.

 _'Hey,'_  Dean mouthed, pulling his boots off.

 _'Hello,'_ Cas mouthed back.

"How's it going?" Dean kept his voice low, and silently wondered why they weren't sitting on the couch or at the table. Then he thought of the tub earlier, and how his ghost had struggled to sit on it, and eventually connected all the dots.

Sitting on the floor was fine. He didn't want a couch or a chair anyway, not if Cas couldn't sit on it.

His blue eyes on Dean's brother, Cas murmured, "Sam is energetic, efficient, and excited."

Dean snorted softly. "Exhausting, isn't it?" he commented, keeping with the 'e' trend that Cas had started.

But Cas really did sound exhausted. When he spoke just then, his voice cut in and out, and it took everything Dean had not to fuss over him in concern.

Nodding, Castiel smiled that wry smile again, and just gazed at Dean for a long second.

"If I wouldn't fall through it, I would rest my head on your shoulder," he whispered, words still cutting in and out of Dean's dimension.

 _That isn't fair_ , Dean thought. Cas wasn't allowed to say things like that. He wasn't allowed to vocalise what they wanted, because it only made it more difficult not to do so. Winded, Dean deflated, and the corners of his lips grew heavy with his trapped reply.

Cas must have seen the effect his impossible wishes had on Dean, because his face fell in a mimicry of the sad-faced emoticons he would draw on a steamed mirror. The face was ridiculous enough to pull a laugh from Dean, and as he placed his hand over the image of Castiel's, he whispered, "Thanks, Casper," and became completely oblivious to the sounds of Sam clicking his fingers and hissing both their names.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long to post! I had it half written for ages, and I finally finished it off today. Now that my DCBB draft is in, I can work on this properly again, so it's hopefully back to regular updates! I hope you enjoy the chapter :)

When the only light left in the room came from Sam's laptop, that's when it was declared time for bed. Sam shotgunned Dean's bed, as there was no way a two-seater couch would fit his 6’4 frame of bulk, and when Dean heard the springs of his mattress squeak as they were flopped on, he did some flopping of his own.

The couch barely fit him either, but Sam's comfort always came first.

Dean thought about popping _Superman_ in the DVD player, so Cas could understand the floating head reference, but his drooping eyelids ultimately decided against it. Well, that and the post-its and photos stuck to the TV.

Just as he was about to drift off, Castiel's gravelly tones wished him, "Goodnight, Dean."

"Mmm," he groaned, his lips barely awake enough to part. "Was just 'bout to fall 'sleep."

"Then fall asleep. I will watch over you."

Somehow, Cas could say that and not sound like a total creeper.

There was silence once more, and Dean could have fallen asleep quite happily, but a pleasant buzz stroking through his hair kept him awake and relaxed.

"Are you petting my head?"

The buzzing stopped.

"Noooo," Dean whined, "keep doing it. Please. S'nice."

He was too tired to care about anything but how good it felt. It was as though Cas had rubbed a balloon on his head, and was commanding his hairs stand on end by holding the balloon above him, only the balloon was filled with the arousal you get from reading a good book.

Dean was sleepy; he didn't need to worry about how terrible his analogies were.

The arousal-filled balloon buzz started up again, and Dean's chest swelled with the need to purr. He must have been making some sort of happy noises, because Cas chuckled, and the vibrations moved to one of his cheeks. It was almost as if Castiel was really touching him. As if he were feeding the cuddle monster that Dean really was.

Out of the blue, after a few seconds, minutes, or hours of pleasant buzzing, Dean asked, "What do you think Heaven's gonna be like?"

"Heaven," Castiel quietly repeated. For a few moments, the vibrations stopped while he thought.

“I could tell you my idea, if you want,” offered Dean in a mumble.

“Alright.”

“Okay, so my Heaven - if there’s like, a Heaven for everyone - it would include free apple pie, all the time, made by my mom, ‘cause I remember that hers was awesome, and there’d be other pies too, yeah, but apple’s the most important.”

Cas laughed softly, and started trailing his fingers up and down Dean’s arms. The hairs all rose to greet him, the blood feeling as though it were fizzing beneath, and Dean sleepily continued:

“Obviously Sammy’s there, but maybe he’s shorter than me. Yeah, he’s shorter than me in my Heaven, and Dad comes round every Sunday for dinner. Maybe my real dad’s there too, but I dunno, only at Thanksgiving. And there’s my Baby and burgers and stuff like that, and maybe a memory foam mattress, I like those... and I guess you can come round whenever you want.”

“How generous of you,” Cas said dryly.

“No, I mean it, man.” Dean waved a hand in front of him, attempting to clap his ghost on the chest, or on the shoulder. “You can turn on anything you like, any time. I want you there.”

“Anything I like?”

“Yup.”

“How about I turn…”

As Cas trailed off, the erect hairs of Dean’s arms flagged, but soon enough his thighs were being massaged with a deep buzz.

“... _you_ on?”

Dean groaned. “Ah - that’s probably something you should save for another time, buddy.”

“I don’t want to wait until Heaven,” came Cas’s gruff and petulant reply, thick with growing arousal.

“You won’t, I promise. You can turn me on any time you like, just not when I’m too tired to get turned on.”

“You had better keep your promise, Dean.”

Vibrations trailed over his lips.

“I will, Cas. Promise.”

After a few seconds, minutes, or hours of quiet, Dean thought he heard a distant, “ _You_ ,” but could not make head nor tail of it so nodded off, a low hum caressing his lips and coaxing his happy trail to rise with sleepy glee.

It was just after dawn that Dean whispered his morning goodbyes to his brother and his ghost, and left for work. Being the boss, he didn't need to be there from open til close, but Dean liked to be. He couldn't stand it if he were the kind of boss who turned up, signed off on a few orders, and collected his paycheck. Dean was hands on, with the cars and the customers. It kept him humble. Plus, it meant that he didn't have to hire a head mechanic and itch when they didn't do things his way.

Jo was leaning against the door as though she were Rose floating next to a sinking Titanic when he arrived, donning huge sunglasses, a messy bun, and the largest styrofoam cup of coffee Dean had ever seen.

"Good morning!" he yelled, grinning when Jo winced. "Didn't expect to see you here today."

"Shut up," snapped she in return with a scowl Dean could see even with the bug eyes.

He unlocked the front door to reception and clapped Jo on her petite shoulders. Jo jumped, only her steady hands protecting her shirt from burning coffee, and made a disgusted noise at the back of her throat.

"You're the worst," she croaked.

"I'm the best and you know it."

Immediately, Dean froze and inwardly cringed. He hoped Jo knew he wasn't teasing her about her crush, but she didn't seem to notice. It was either the hangover or the fact that she was used to Dean saying things like that.

They walked into reception, and Jo carefully placed her coffee on the counter before trying to hop up as she did every morning.

This was not every morning.

Try as she might, she could not summon the strength to jump, never mind use her arms to propel her instead, so Dean chivalrously put his hands on her tiny waist and helped her up as though she was an injured cat.

Still, Jo scowled even though usually she would give a triumphant smile at being taller than Dean, but it softened a little when she muttered, "Thanks. For getting me home safe last night, I mean. I owe you one."

"No problem, little lady," Dean said, and for the first time in using his nickname for her did he notice Jo's pink cheeks.

Jo did not notice him noticing, for she added with a groan, "And I think not telling my mom that I got a _hangover_ goes without saying. She'd be so disappointed in me."

"What, that you were drinking?"

"No, that I couldn't hold my liqueur."

Dean gave a long nod. From what he'd heard, Ellen Harvelle wasn't your run-of-the-mill mother. She had a gun collection, for one thing, and could drink anyone under the table.

He planned to test that one day.

Without thinking, Dean placed a coaster under Jo's cup. "Being hungover's no excuse to disrespect my favourite secretary," he said pointedly.

Jo stuck out her tongue. "Nancy's your only secretary."

"Yeah, and one day she's gonna get sick of people ignoring her coaster rule and leave. And I don't want that. She's sweet."

"She's a virgin," Jo muttered before getting flicked on the shell of her ear.

"Hey, it's a _choice_." Dean frowned. Sure, at first when he found out, it was a little weird. For Dean, wanting to stay pure til marriage was a difficult concept to wrap his head around, but he'd managed to do it, just like Nancy'd managed to wrap her head around Dean practicing bisexuality. They had come to a mutual respect, and a mutual liking of each other. Nancy had even patched him up when a car jack had a tantrum and attacked him.

Jo stuck her tongue out again, this time rubbing her ear, and pouted after.

"You know, just for that comment, I'm putting you on inventory today." Dean fisted his hands on his hips and stuck his tongue back out at her. It wasn't exactly professional or mature, but it sure felt good when Jo groaned in protest.

The rest of the working day passed at a snail's pace. Dean was itching to get back to the amateur detective work Sam was doing, and couldn't manage to get his mind off the way Cas wanted to turn him on and flick through his settings.

Dean shuddered with pleasure at the thought, and nearly dropped a wrench on his face while he was at it.

 _God_. Is this what it had come to? Nearly dropping wrenches on his face because he got distracted by what Cas had said? Who, by the way, was a _ghost_ and not even Dean's boyfriend. Who couldn't ever be Dean's boyfriend.

Dejectedly, Dean focused on the car he was under, and lost himself in the buzz of the garage. The radio was on inside, playing what he thought might be Christian rock. _Must be Nancy's pick today,_ Dean thought. There was a grumpy customer a couple of cars away, being dealt with by Ash. That was good. Dean didn't know how he did it, but Ash always managed to get the Monday morning clients to calm down when their cars broke down on the way to work. And closest of all, was a clipped, irritated English accent hissing orders down a phone.

"No, you don't understand. I need that artifact by tonight. You're supposed to be the medium, Miss Moseley, so do the job I'm paying you to do and find out where he hid it before he died."

A medium? A genuine medium? Dean rolled himself into the sun and surveyed the area until he found the source of the voice.

It was a young woman, with a determined scowl on her decidedly feline features. She huffed as she ended the call with an annoyed finger, and composed herself in an instant. She stared around the yard, her delicately manicured hands on her hips, and rose an eyebrow when she caught Dean's eye.

"May I help you?" she said with the kind of simper that meant she would most likely not.

Dean thought about shaking his head for a moment, but the opportunity her question presented was too good to pass up.

"Uh, yeah, actually, if you don't mind."

He sat up and for the second time in his life, Dean prayed. Dean prayed that the medium would help them understand what was happening.

The woman sighed and awaited Dean's question.

"I didn't mean to eavesdrop, but that medium you were talking to - she the real deal?"

"I certainly hope so," she snorted, "she's my ticket to the biggest sale of my life."

"Could I get her number?" Dean asked with the most charming smile he could muster.

However, the woman seemed to be immune to Dean's charm. It was his desperation that had her bartering, "I'll give you her number... for twenty percent off my subtotal."

Dean glared at her smirk. "Ten percent."

"Fifteen."

"Twelve."

"Twelve _point five._ "

Rolling his eyes, Dean shook her dainty hand and jotted down the medium's number in chicken-scratch handwriting. _Missouri Moseley._ Maybe she had the key to the lock on Cas's whole ghost thing. An insight to where the light was at the end of Cas's tunnel.

In Dean's eyes, Cas already had a light in his life, but maybe that wasn't enough.

Dean shook his head at himself as he scooted back under the car. He was selfish for thinking he could be enough for someone who so desperately wanted to move on. Selfish and stupid.

He didn't even come close to dropping his wrench on his face for the rest of his morning shift.

Lunch was quiet. All the cars that had been towed and pushed into the garage had driven out, and all that was left to be worked on was a few restorations, a couple of burnt clutches, and a faulty brake light that was a particularly difficult size. Dean grazed while he sourced parts, and only took a break when he hit a brick wall with that dumb brake light. He sent a text to Charlie, asking her to work her computer magic to find one, and while waiting for an answer, called his brother.

"Hey, how's it goin'?" Dean asked, hugging the phone to his ear with his shoulder while he cleaned out the grime under his nails.

_"Well, we're slowly building a case, but... we don't have any evidence to prove that Roman or Crowley were behind Bobby and Cas's deaths. That stuff's still speculation. It won't fly well in court unless we've got something to support it."_

"But we're still goin' ahead, aren't we? I mean, your firm's backing you up?"

Sam paused. _"...Sort of. It's a big case, Dean,_ huge, _and they're taking a huge risk by running with it. It could shut us down if we lose."_

Dean thought as much. Roman was powerful enough within the state _and_ the country to have Sam's name blacklisted in the law books forever if they lost, which was why losing wasn't an option.

"The truth is out there, Sam, it has to be," he reassured the both of them.

 _"If you say so, Mulder,"_ Sam snorted.

Rolling his eyes, Dean asked, "Is Cas there?"

_"Yeah, you want me to put you on speaker?"_

"No, just... hold the phone up to his ear or something."

Dean could practically hear the roll of his brother's eyes, with the crackle of an exasperated shuffle accompanying it.

_"Hello Dean."_

"Hey, Cas," said Dean, a smile softening his voice. "How are you? Not turning any more invisible girl?"

_"I don't think so, Sam would have alerted me if I were turning... invisible girl. Though I don't think my transition into incorporeality will change my gender. It didn’t before."_

If Dean was smiling before, he was grinning now. "Of course you don't. Anyway, I got good news. I think I found someone who can help with your ghost thing."

The line freaked out and replicated the crunch of a boiled candy wrapper while static jumped through the speaker and stabbed Dean’s ear. It was either a very good sign, or a very bad sign.

“Cas, you still there? What happened?”

Cas’s voice came through cracked and distant, but still familiar, like the spider-webbed stained glass window across the street that shone into Dean’s room on a sunny day. _“My ‘ghost thing’ happened. I seem to have it under control but…”_ He faded out, and Dean couldn’t figure out whether it was conscious or not. There was another jolt of static, this time shocking Dean’s hand, and Cas faded back in. _“...ppose that is good news. Who is it?”_

“Her name’s Missouri, and she’s a medium,” said Dean, coughing to conceal the concern in his voice. “I’m gonna call her and see what she can do.”

_“That sound - plan, and I sha - you when you - from work. Doctor Sexy is o - ...Dean?”_

Dean would have laughed if he weren’t so worried. “Yeah, I didn’t get any of that, but I’ll see you later, okay?”

The tone beeped, and the call ended. Was Cas fading out of reality as well as phone calls? Surely Sam would have told him before handing him over? Dean shook his head. The sooner they went to the medium, the sooner everything could be okay again. Huffing a poor laugh, Dean imagined taking the medium into court with them and using her as a witness. He breathed out a weak giggle when he imagined using _Cas_ as a witness. _‘Your honour, this is Castiel Novak, and he was killed by one of the defendant’s men. You can hardly see him, but he’s there. Do the light switch trick.’_ Somehow, Dean didn’t think that would fly well in court either.

He peered out the window in his office, scoping the yard for any trouble. They could cope without him for another ten minutes, and the staff in the garage didn’t need him anyway, judging by the cameras hooked up to Dean’s computer.

Nervous as hell, Dean dialled Missouri Moseley’s number.

The smell of vinegar on cold lettuce greeted Dean when he returned home, a smell that had the hairs in Dean’s nose curling.

_Salad._

At the small table in the kitchen, Sam was writing with one hand and forking lettuce into his mouth with the other. The container the salad came in was a clear plastic tub, so Dean could see all the rabbit food his brother was consuming. Carrot shavings, baby tomatoes, green stuff... and worst of all, Dean could see the logo on the label of the tub.

Sam had ordered salad from a _pizza place_. Without pizza. Dean had never felt more betrayed in all his life.

“What’d the medium say?” Sam asked around the crunch of lettuce, not looking up from whatever he was writing.

“She wants to meet him, but she doesn’t make house-calls.”

It was then that Sam glanced up, a frown screwing up his face. “But Cas can’t leave the apartment.”

“That’s what I told her,” Dean recounted as he pulled out the chair opposite his brother and seated himself, “and then she said I wasn’t the shiniest spanner in the toolbox, and to call her when I figure out his object. His _object?_ What does that even mean?”

Sam shrugged. “Oh, and by the way, I spoke with Jody today. She made Captain after Bobby died, didja hear?”

Dean nodded. Jody had been Acting Captain while Bobby was undercover anyway, so it made sense to take the ‘acting’ out of her title.

A tickle niggled in Dean’s chest moments later, but it wasn’t a tickle he could laugh at and squirm off. It was a tickle that had niggled for years, ever since Bobby adopted Sam too.

Sam never called Bobby ‘Dad’.

Sure, Dean liked to interchange between the two, but even when Sam was a kid, it was always just... _Bobby_. On Father’s Day, Sam would call it Bobby’s Day, and would go out of his way to correct people that he didn’t live with his dad, he lived with Bobby. Bobby never seemed to mind, but Dean did. It was a reminder of the few years when Sam was lost in the system, and it set Dean off thinking all sorts of reasons as to why his brother could never call their father ‘Dad’.

As usual, he ignored it, and squashed it down to deal with another day, preferably a day when that was all that was left to deal with.

“So anyway, she’s going to try and get the warrants for all the buildings Cas told us about approved, as well as bring Crowley in for questioning,” Sam said, scrawling something else in his notebook. Off hand, he added, “And just so you know, I’m staying at a hotel tonight.”

“What? Why?”

“Better catering, and no offense Dean, but I need a bigger bed than yours.” Sam smirked, and Dean couldn’t argue. Even his feet dangled off the edge when he was feeling particularly tall.

“If it means you’re not gonna stink out the place with your rabbit food, I’m happy,” Dean countered, earning a kick under the table. “Hey, where’s Cas?”

Sam directed him to the lounge, where Cas was hovering on the couch, watching Dr. Sexy, M.D. Dean had been too distracted by the smell of lettuce that he hadn’t even noticed. He maneouvered through the strings and the papers than hung from them, and sat next to his ghost. Dean greeted him once, greeted him twice, and received a cold shoulder in more way than one.

“Hello? Earth to Cas?” Dean waved a hand in front of Cas’s glacier blue eyes. Could Castiel not hear him? Had his ghost thing taken a turn for the worse?

Cas sniffed. “I said hello to you when you came in, but you ignored me.”

Dean didn’t mean to laugh, he really didn’t, but he was just so damn _relieved_ that Cas was just ignoring him.

“And now you’re laughing at me,” said Cas petulantly, folding his arms.

“No, no, no, I’m not, I thought you couldn’t hear me, but it was just you ignoring me ‘cause I didn’t hear you earlier,” Dean replied, trying to appease his ghost with a smile, and faltering when he heard his words back. “I didn’t hear you earlier,” he repeated, all traces of the smile vanished.

The stone wall on Cas’s face was knocked down by disappointment, and their deflated gazes met. Dean worried his lips together while Cas parted his to release a tiny sigh that neither felt on their skin.

“Okay guys, I’ll see you tomorrow!” Sam called as he lugged one of Dean’s large suitcases behind him.

“Bye, Sam,” Cas said as Dean muttered, “See ya,” neither of them breaking their gazes even when the door slammed.

A distraction. That’s what Dean needed. One that didn’t smell like salad, and one that wasn’t talking about the case files that literally hung over their heads. The night before, Cas had very nearly distracted him from sleep with the hum of his skin on Dean’s, so perhaps now Dean wasn’t so powered down, Cas could flick through his settings as he’d imagined in the day.

‘Go big or go home’ sprung to mind, and seeing as Dean was already home, he could only go big.

“Cas, you ever watch me jerk off?”

Even in all his transparent glory, Cas blushed. “Um,” he started, swallowing thickly, “I suppose that - I tried to - You would never - no. I mean, yes. I have.” His voice was barely above a whisper.

Dean inched his hand up his thigh (his own thigh, that was), grinning at Castiel’s squirming.

“It’s okay, I’m not mad. I kinda like the idea of you watching,” he said, his grin now an easy smirk.

“I did more than watch,” Cas murmured, still as pink as raw beef.

Dean’s eyebrows nearly shot off his forehead.

“I would feel awful afterwards, but sometimes I would... get off... through my pants.”

“You’d rub yourself off?”

Breathless though he was dead, Cas nodded.

Well, who would have known that the founder of The Clarence Trust was a little peeping tom. Dean’s dick sure liked the idea of that. His hand inched further up ‘til he was brazenly palming his crotch, and Dean kissed the air before Cas’s shocked lips. It didn’t feel as ridiculous as when he did it to Cas’s cheek in the bathroom the day before, so he kissed the air again, and again, and again until his lips sung with the vibrations of Castiel’s.

Dean unzipped his jeans, took himself out, and started jerking himself off. The vibrations stopped as Cas looked down in wonder, his face a picture, flushed and open-mouthed, and as if he were on a delay started to rub himself too.

“God, you’re beautiful,” Dean murmured as Cas’s eyelashes fluttered in ecstasy.

“As are you,” Cas said in a groan, “and more so when you’re like this.”

“What, jerking off?”

Cas nodded, his eyes screwed shut and his bottom lip bitten white.

Dean straddled the image of Cas with a hand on the back of the couch for leverage, still stroking himself with the other. He gazed down at the wonderful ghost he would so miss, and forgot all about it when a buzz caressed the back of Dean’s neck and slid through his hair. All the hairs on his body stood to vie for Cas’s attention, as if to say _look at me! I’m all grown up thanks to you!_ , even the hairs in the sparse nest around Dean’s cock.

The gentle vibrations that brushed his cheek coupled with the pure adoration in Cas’s every feature set Dean off, and as he came, he pressed his slack mouth to Cas’s, almost feeling pliable lips moulding to it. His eyes remained closed as he moaned quietly through the twitches before the afterglow, and immediately he regretted it when he heard Cas breathily come beneath him.

Opening his eyes at once to see Cas twitching too, Dean’s relaxed smile dropped.

He was straddling thin air, and that could only mean one thing.

Cas was incorporeal again.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a little late posting than I (and I'm sure a few of you) would have liked, sorry! I spent the last week and a half alternating between sleeping and throwing up, which left me no time to write. So though this is shorter than some of my recent chapters, I hope this makes up for my tardiness! :)

“ _Shit shit shit shit shit,_ ”  Dean muttered as he ran to the bathroom, his post-coital high long dissipated, along with Castiel.

“Fuck, _come on,_ ” he urged the shower as it took too long to steam up the mirror.

Dean sat on the toilet tid with his knees supporting his elbows and his hands supporting his head, the singular light bulb in the room flickering weakly. At least that meant that Cas was there, even if he was invisible.

For what seemed like the umpteenth time in the last few days, Dean congratulated himself on his stupidity. So caught up in Cas dying permanently, he’d completely disregarded the fact that Cas could disappear into thin air as quickly as he had appeared. Unfortunately, the fact that Cas _had_ disappeared into thin air was far more difficult to completely disregard.

An invisible finger squeaked on the mirror, and Dean’s heart jumped for all the wrong reasons. What once was the highlight of his home life was now a cheap knock off for the real thing, but all the same, Dean read the words.

 _I’m here,_ it said, along with a disappointed emoticon.

“Hey, Casper,” Dean replied, expecting to be corrected.

He wasn’t.

“Maybe if I, uh - maybe if I touch your hand again…?”

Dean reached out to the edge of the sink, but there was no pop of the lightbulb, no stop of the shower, nada. His face returned to his palms, and it took all of Dean’s strength not to wet them.

_My hand is now on your shoulder_

A poor imitation of a laugh left Dean’s lips. It was more of a sob than a laugh, really, one of frustration. His magic touch worked before, why couldn’t it work once more? Oh yes, that was it - because the world was against the Winchesters and everyone they loved.

“I’m really gonna miss your face, Cas,” Dean said, his voice breaking through his fingers.

 _And I shall miss you looking at me,_ Cas wrote, hastily adding in smaller letters, _the way you looked at me._

Dean had no words. At another time, he might be embarrassed by Cas’s admission, but he was too far gone for that. He’d just come kissing the static off Cas’s lips for Christ’s sake, there was no room for romantic blushy shit when it came to the fact that they’d miss exchanging lingering looks. And not only would Dean miss the looks; his ears would ache for the timbre of Cas’s voice, his eyes would search for that bolt of blue, and his mouth would instinctively pucker with the thought of the ghost’s pink pout.

However, even though having Cas as a human for a while was the best thing since Betty White made her comeback, Dean had missed the haunted aspects of the apartment. The thirteens and fourteens, all the appliances going haywire when he got home as though they were dogs bounding up to meet him (but, like, cute dogs, ones that Dean liked), and the emoticons in the mirror. Plus, ghost-Cas was better than no Cas, right?

 _Right,_ Dean thought firmly. He was lucky to have a Cas at all, so he shouldn’t be bemoaning their predicament.

The light flickered, a reminder that Cas was still very much present, and Dean pulled a weak smile. _Ghost-Cas is better than no Cas,_ he inwardly repeated until it started to sink its claws in.

A poorly-drawn heart etched itself onto the mirror, and instead of making a big song and dance about it, Dean shut off the water and walked out, concerned lights and worried whirs following him into his room.

“Look, Cas buddy, I just wanna be alone right now, okay?” Dean said, snapping more than he meant to.

The volume on the T.V switched between thirteen and fourteen, albeit somehow sadly.

Dean flopped onto his bed, retrieved his phone from his pocket, and forced his thumbs to send a text to Sam about the change of species Cas had undergone again. He didn’t wait for a reply, and crashed out to the faint flash of a flickering light that snuck in through the gap below the door and lit his lids an occasional red. One last stupid thought made an appearance, one that Dean both batted away and mulled over.

If he never woke up, he could see Cas again.  

Castiel hovers over the arm of the couch, glum and lugubrious as he plays with the light outside Dean’s door. For how long, he doesn’t know.

He chides himself over the heart, which is now as invisible as he is. What was he expecting? For Dean to swoon and confess his undying love for his dead roommate? If Castiel is honest, he wasn’t expecting that exactly, but he was expecting something other than Dean declaring his want to be alone.

 _Perhaps,_ Castiel thinks, _perhaps I am atrocious at intercourse._ He already has his suspicions about the skill of his verbal intercourse, but he’s never particularly pondered the physical side of it. Not that he’s ever had occasion to explore it. Going from homeless to philanthropist to undercover amateur agent so quickly didn’t really leave Castiel much time to date.

A click brings him out of his head. Castiel thinks it might be Dean coming out of his room, but it’s too far away for that possibility. Frowning, he surveys the windows for a splatter of bird excrement or a pebble dropped by a different bird’s feet, but there’s no evidence that suggests either.

_click_

He turns his head to the front door. There’s another click, and gingerly, the door creaks open. A flashlight protrudes through the crack and the lounge is lit in an oscillating searchlight, one that is not welcome in Castiel’s home.

The last time someone broke in, the tenant died. That can’t happen again. Castiel won’t let it.

Red flares up in his belly, and the intruder’s flashlight fritzes into darkness.

“Aww, shit,” the intruder mutters, looking down the lens and tapping it. The light sparks for just a few seconds before Castiel extinguishes it, but it’s enough for him to recognise who it is.

It’s Andy Gallagher, a boy - no, man - The Clarence Trust rehabilitated. All the naivety in his eyes has been replaced with slyness, the spring in his step stamped out, and there’s a jitter in his fingers, as though they’re unused to not picking locks.

“Andy,” Castiel murmurs, “What did they do to you?”

And how many more will the Leviathans corrupt or kill before they are stopped?

There’s a flutter of paper as Andy walks into one of the many strings Sam hung, and he curses, but evidently he’s found what he’s looking for. He feels his way along the many intertwining strings, plucking the pieces of evidence off one by one and bundling them in the nearest thing available.

 _“No.”_ Sam’s hard work is being ripped down and scrunched in dirty, trembling hands, and Castiel did _not_ die for all that evidence to go to waste.

“Stop!” he yells, but it’s no use. Andy continues stealing the only proof they have, and Dean does not awake.

Heat courses through Castiel’s veins, and lights ripple and flicker through the room. The coffee machine revs in the kitchen, the television menacingly switches through all the late night dramas and cop shows, and it’s when the toaster pops sans toast that Andy is spooked.

 _“Get. Out.”_ Castiel booms in the most threatening voice he can, pointless though it is.

He rehabilitates this man, and this is what Castiel receives? His home soiled yet again by Leviathan filth? There’s a bad taste in Castiel’s mouth, bile rising in his throat, and the pure _anger_ he feels at being so helpless in the situation he was murdered in once before is expelled in a guttural shout. Castiel advances on Andy, fueled by his frustration, and lashes out.

The hands that couldn’t touch Dean’s, that couldn’t shake Sam’s, push Andy out the door. Though only the moon lights the apartment, Castiel can see the whites of Andy’s eyes. He’s trembling for a different reason now, but Castiel can’t find it in himself to care. He won’t. Just like he wouldn’t let anyone be harmed by another intruder.

Castiel stands triumphant in the doorway, but still abuzz with anger. Andy scrabbles to get up, and runs, but Castiel is not letting him get away that easily. He runs after him, grabs the fire extinguisher next to the stairway and swings it with all his might into the back of Andy’s head. The bundle of evidence falls out of his limp fingers, and a freeze of ice cools the boil in Castiel’s blood.

Lights Dean wasn’t even aware of shook him awake, and once he was conscious he wondered how he could ever have been the opposite, what with the commotion going on.

Everything was on and whirring and revving and and humming and being far too loud for two forty-seven am.

Slow on the uptake, Dean threw the covers off and sought whatever it was that was wrong. All the lamps and spotlights were blinking in a Mexican wave of sorts, and it took a few rounds for Dean to realise where they were leading him.

But that was... _impossible,_ right?

Dean poked his head out of his very open front door. “Cas?” he whispered into the hallway. “You out here?”

Something glowed around the corner that led to the stairwell, but before Dean found the glowy thing, he found a man who appeared to be knocked out, some papers and Cas’s trenchcoat in hand.

“Cas? Did you get out?”

He felt as though he were chastising a housecat who had bitten the screws off the catflap. The glowy thing glowed again, and after some cautious searching, Dean found a flashlight under the coat. It lit itself once for yes.

“But... how?” he asked, genuinely baffled.

The flashlight said nothing.

“What happened? Did you Swayze him?”

Dean had never seen a more confused flashlight in his life, so he leafed through the papers and found the reason Cas had done whatever it was that he had done. Muttering a temporary farewell, Dean carried them back into the apartment, and returned with his phone in hand. Did he text Sam first or call the police? He deemed the second wiser, and caressed the flashlight the soote its yellow twitches.

The guy Cas somehow knocked out woke up just after the cops arrived, and started raving about an invisible man before they dragged him away in cuffs.

Yep. Cas definitely knocked him out.

To save face (though it didn’t particularly need saving, what with the guy appearing batshit crazy or astoundingly drunk), Dean took the rap for conking him over the head with the fire extinguisher after he tried to get away with some valuable belongings.

 _The fire extinguisher? Really, Cas?_ he silently sent to his ghost when he realised the weapon.

It was dawn by the time the police were done with their questions, and Dean sent another text to Sam to update him yet again. And of course, because Sam was already up _jogging_ at that ungodly hour, he texted back, and arranged a time to come round to ‘deal with it’.

With the intention of catching perhaps ten winks if he was lucky before his brother arrived, Dean slid into bed, shielding his eyes from the yawning sun.

And because he was shielding his eyes, Dean did not notice every bulb in the apartment tremoring and shivering in uncontrollable anger.


	11. Chapter 11

It was the delicate tinkle of the doorbell that woke Dean up. Bleary eyed, he grunted _morning_ to the weakly flickering lights (which Dean assumed meant that Cas was bleary eyed too) and received a healthy dose of friction burn as he dragged his feet all the way to the front door.

“Hey, you okay?” Sam worried, peppy and concerned both at the same time.

Dean nodded, and used the usual excuse. “Tired.” He couldn’t even muster the energy to come up with a joke about the fancy hotel with its big beds and healthy breakfasts.

After a long, uncomfortable pause in which Dean flopped on the couch and Sam near tip-toed in to perch on the edge of the table, the blender whirred loudly, and despite the atmosphere, Sam huffed a private laugh.

“Hi, Cas. You doin’ alright?”

The television switched on and changed to the Fox News channel.

“That means no,” informed a mumbling Dean. “Can’t blame him. He’s gone ghost, someone broke into our apartment, and all pop music is stupid.”

Sam made a face at that last part, one that was half-frown-half-scoffing smile. “What does tha—”

Like a sentinel meerkat, Dean’s head interrupted by appearing over the back of the couch, a dazed expression on it. “Someone broke into our apartment, and Cas went after them. But Cas can’t leave the apartment. Basic guidelines of being a ghost. So how did he? How’d you do it, Cas?”

The apartment was silent, and the only light that was shed on it was from the morning sun.

“He doesn’t know.”

“Or,” Sam said in an exasperated tone, “it’s not a yes or no question, and he _can’t_ answer.”

Dean shook his head. “No, if he knew, he’d turn the bathroom light on.”

It was a shame that Cas didn’t have the power to turn the lightbulbs above their heads on. It could have been because Dean had got around three hours of sleep, but his mind was drawing a blank on what could have had Cas walking through forbidden walls. Well, there was one idea of Cas being a super-ghost, but he imagined the look Sam would give him if he expressed it, and kept quiet. Otherwise, there was nothing. Dean’s mind was Pluto (not the cartoon dog, the not-quite-planet), devoid of anything but probable guesses, and almost completely in the dark.

However, the lightbulb above Sam’s head was not so faulty.

“Wait... What did you say that medium said about taking Cas to see her? She said that you had to figure out his object, right? So what if the guy who broke in took his object, and that’s why Cas could leave?”

The trenchcoat. It had to be. Dean grabbed it and strode into the hall, Sam carefully following, with Cas hopefully on their tails. The dark corridor lit up like Christmas, and the boys grinned triumphantly. Dean whooped before remembering that it was still pretty much the ass-crack of dawn, and scuttled back into the front room.

The boys then declared the plan of action (for the day, anyway). Dean would call the medium and book an appointment for as soon as possible, and Sam would whisk Cas away into the bathroom where they would discuss more about the case. Apparently Sam’s boss had more questions for the mysterious mole.

At the table, Dean distractedly thumbed Missouri’s number, his head turned towards the the steam escaping from the gap under the bathroom door. Something was flaring up in his gut, and it certainly wasn’t jealousy. He had nothing to be jealous of, nothing in there he should be coveting, and even if he did then it shouldn’t matter, because anything Sam and Cas were doing in the steam was strictly business, and nothing else. Of course, there was that time about half a year ago when Sam had walked out of the steam, only dressed in a towel and confusion. He’d found _‘_ _Hello Sam’_ written on the mirror, and thought it strange there were no dicks drawn on there as per usual. Dean had had to pretend he had grown too mature to draw dicks on things anymore, all the while unanswerable questions flooded his mind. Well, two. _Did Cas see Sam naked? Does Cas like Sam’s body better than mine?_ And that was assuming that Cas had seen Dean naked by that point. After all, he wasn’t exactly a modest man in his own home, and certainly not in the time when he thought he was the lone tenant.

Dean moved into the kitchen to make the call. He didn’t need Sam’s echoing voice diverting his attention away from the phone. Dialling the number, Dean absently wondered what the future held for them all. Perhaps Roman would really go down, after all this time. Perhaps he wouldn’t, and anger would forever reside in Dean’s heart. Perhaps Crowley would be the fall guy, and—

_“Missouri Moseley, medium of the Midwest.”_

“Hey, Miss Moseley. It’s Dean Winchester.”

She clucked her tongue, and Dean shrank immediately. There was just something about the woman that Dean kowtowed to. _“Call me Missouri,”_ she softly commanded in her high southern accent. _“I take it you found your spirit’s tether?”_

“Yeah, we did, “ Dean nodded, “ so when can I bring him to see you? Can we come today?”

He might have sounded eager, but in Dean’s experience, playing the important stuff cool never worked out.

_“Y’all are in luck; I just had someone cancel their four o’clock, so you boys can visit then.”_

In just seven hours, they would have answers.

Dean thanked her and rapped on the bathroom door to let the other two know. Apparently, Cas drew a thumbs up in the steam, and as Sam regaled the quality of the drawing in a teasing fashion, Dean leaned on the door with a gentle smile playing on his lips. He would have liked to see the poorly drawn thumb, but his feet would not pass the threshold.

A quiet gasp took Dean’s notice from his concrete feet, and instead of putting his effort into hammering them into moving, he put it into listening through the door as hard as he could. Never in all of his life had he heard Sam gasp, so whatever it was Cas had written, it had to be a real something.

“I don’t know, man,” came Sam’s hushed tones, “it’s kinda risky. But you should do whatever you think it is you should do. I mean, what do you want? What could come out of this?”

Dean heard a very small squeak, and if he didn’t know any better, he would have called the exterminators.

There was a choked laugh, and then Sam said, “Really? You think so? All I’m saying is, I know my brother, and I just don’t think—”

He had heard enough. The hold on Dean’s feet retreated, and so did Dean – right out the door.

Dean returned to the apartment after driving around the city for a few hours Ferris Bueller style. At first, he didn’t know where he was going (apart from in circles), but he found himself taking the roads that led to Millenium Park, more specifically The Bean. He’d stared into his warped reflection for what seemed like an eternity, shutters clicking and crowds swarming all around him, with only the thought of change on his mind. Because that was it, wasn’t it? Everything was going to change. For Sam, the slow-building case could make or break his career. For Cas, it could send him to the afterlife or keep him hanging around the apartment. And for Dean, it could give him the justice he so wanted and bereave him of the person he was falling in love with, or let him keep that person around but leave him with a larger sense of injustice.

 _Change changes everything_ _,_ he bitterly thought as he turned the key. A note on the table told Dean that Sam had gone back to the hotel to relay everything to his boss, so Dean pricked his ears up for any signs of the supernatural.

“Casper?”

The blender whirred feebly.

Dean swallowed and grabbed the trenchcoat on his way to the kitchen. “C’mon, let’s go. It’s like a three hour drive.”

The blender whirred a little less feebly in protest.

“Hey, don’t be like that. You get to ride shotgun in my baby!”

The freezer churned out a couple of cubes of ice.

Dean wrinkled his nose. “Ew. I don’t even wanna know if that’s good ice or bad ice.”

For the first hour of the drive, Baby couldn’t make up her mind as to whether she liked having a ghost in her front seat or not. She revved, she shuddered, and her gas gage acted as though it was the second hand of a clock. But as they finally started seeing signs to Mason County, the radio crackled, and began to do the worst.

It began to flick through the country stations.

“Baby, no!” Dean whined. “You betrayed me! I can’t believe you would— _unless,_ my baby isn’t betraying me…” He glared at the trenchcoat next to him, and the radio switched stations again. “Country, Cas? Really? Really?”

The volume adjusted itself by way of saying _yes, so suck it_ _,_ and Dean scoffed in disgust.

“A _country fan_. I can’t believe I’m falling—” He cut himself off too abruptly, and startled, the radio stuck with the station, allowing the loud, twanged lyrics to fill the car.

> _—Well I went to see the gypsy_  
>  _to have my fortune read_  
>  _She said ‘Man, your baby’s gonna leave you_  
>  _her bags are packed up under the—_

As quickly as he had interrupted himself with silence, Dean followed suit with the radio. The only sound that filled the car after was a soft, _“_ _No.”_

Baby behaved herself for the rest of the journey.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song that plays in the car is Jeff Lynne's [Mercy Mercy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4rrt1xLsNs), which isn't necessarily _country_ country (seeing as he's from Birmingham, England), but you get the gist of why it was used. :) 
> 
> Also, in about a month, my DCBB is going to post! Ahh, I keep switching from excited to nervous and then back again. So I should post an update of this between now and then, because I've got most my editing out the way. And I probably shouldn't tell you guys this, but just so you know, I've lost the notebook I was writing my chapter plans and notes in. D: This is what happens when I don't write things up. So I've got to find that, and then I shall be back on track with this!
> 
> Seriously, I have no idea how long this will be. Maybe another 15k? Who knows! I certainly don't. 
> 
> Alright, I've been too chatty in this note. I hope you enjoyed the chapter! :)


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not-so-fun fact: It has been a whole two months since I updated! Wow. Apologies for that. I went on holiday for a couple of weeks, got a second job, and this has unfortunately fallen to the wayside :( Buuuuuuuut here's the good news! I found the notebook I wrote the ending in, and I've now planned out everything til the end, and we're about halfway through :) Look forward to new characters, new storylines, and of course, the boys being cute through the veil of death.

Missouri Moseley was a short, honest woman with a predisposition for jewellery, headbands, and scolding thirty-year-old men. At least, that’s what Dean found out within a minute of meeting the medium.

“You better not be thinkin’ about comin’ in without wipin’ your feet, boy.”

Dean stared down at her slack-jawed, and his feet automatically wiped themselves on her welcome mat. He almost heard a surprised, pleased laugh beside him as they did so, and tried to look as unabashed as possible. However, Dean only succeeded in looking more admonished.

“Well, ain’t he a sight for sore eyes?” Missouri clucked as Dean’s eyes widened in astonishment.

“You can see him?”

Missouri stared at Dean like _he_ was the ghost. “I was talking to your ghost friend, here. Castiel, was it? A good, solid name; I like it.” She laughed after a beat, and her necklace jingled in amusement as her whole body shook. “If you say so, Cas.”

Her dark eyes intoned, _‘and I’ll never tell’_ as her hand waved them through the beaded curtain to the living room.

The room was... relatively normal. It was certainly devoid of the draped scarves and incense smoke Dean had been expecting, but there were mysterious little fabric baggies strewn around the place. He hoped it wasn’t weed. Even though Dean did his fair share of ‘scooby snacks’ back in the day, he couldn’t have Missouri as high as her voice while she diagnosed Cas with whatever ghostly ailment he had.

Dean’s grip on the trenchcoat grew tighter, and Missouri gave him a warning look. Confused, he pushed through his nerves by folding it instead. He sat, dwarfing the loveseat somewhat, and laid the folded coat next to him, so he would at least have a point of reference for where his ghost was.

“So,” started Missouri, a pleasant, motherly edge to the word, “what seems to be the problem? D’ya need help findin’ his unfinished business?”

If only it were that simple to send Cas to the light. And if only that was the major concern surrounding the ghost haunting his apartment.

“No, it’s not that. It’s not even _finishing_ his unfinished business.”

Missouri raised her eyebrows in a silent, _‘Oh?’_

“I know, right?” Dean was acutely, painfully aware of how unique their problem was. “See, Cas kinda... materialised—what was it—five days ago? Yeah, five days ago. Then he just faded away til he became fully ghost again.”

“And how long did that take?” Missouri asked, concern lacing her clinical question.

“‘Bout three and a half days. Still managed to kick some burglar’s ass, though. Friendly ghost didn’t take too kindly to strangers, did you?”

His hand wandered out to finger the tie of the trenchcoat, and instead of shooting him a quizzical and repulsed expression, Missouri’s eyes softened with sympathy. She nodded, and nodded again at something unheard.

“Tell me everything.”

Dean told her everything, from the moment their hands touched on the sink to ‘fooling around’ on the couch. He skirted over that last part to save embarrassment, and summised the Leviathans’ involvement quickly to save her interest. Missouri’s eyes darted to his right every so often, presumably to hear Cas’s asterisked additions, and nodded to indicate she’d heard them. The consideration she took with Castiel made Dean feel warm inside, like a s’more over a campfire.

He almost wanted to keep her around as a permanent fixture in their lives, if only to be their supernatural translator.

“Dean, I’m gonna say somethin’ to you, and when I do, you’re not gonna believe me,” Missouri said, as plain as Sam’s favourite crackers. Her ‘I’s sounded as though she was opening her mouth for the dentist, which almost distracted Dean from what she next told him.

“Your soul; it’s the brightest I ever saw.”

Dean didn’t believe her.

“Oh, you can see souls now as well as ghosts?” His eyebrows hit his hairline as he sassed her, and his level of disrespect hit the roof, something Missouri did not take kindly to.

She pinned him to the back of the couch with a concrete stare. “I see a lot more than you give me credit for, boy.”

Her stare (and the tension) only broke when the temperature dropped a couple of noticeable degrees and a ghostly gust of wind blew paper in Dean’s face. Somehow, the papercut hurt more than the cinder block that had been thrust into his chest.

“I think that’s Castiel’s way of sayin’ you should apologise,” Missouri wryly pushed.

Dean mumbled his apologies, and stayed quiet for the medium to continue her half-baked—no, _extremely well-founded_ theory.

“As I was sayin’,” she continued, ignoring the way Dean stemmed the tiny waterfall of blood at his cheek, “your soul is so bright, when you touched this poor boy’s spirit in the meanin’ way you did, somethin’ sparked, an’ your ghost here became—sorry, Cas, I don’t mean to hurt your feelin’s here but I gotta dumb this down for him—he became _real_ again.”

So, Cas had done a Pinocchio because apparently Dean’s soul was something of a spark plug. Okay.

“Then after, your soul got… it got tired, ‘cause it used up all it’s energy on makin’ Cas corporeal. And the more you touched, the more it wanted to go to sleep. So when y’all hugged, when y’all kissed—don’t look at me like that, honey, I don’t judge—when y’all shared the same bed, and finally when y’all had your fun on the couch, that’s when the connection between your souls dissipated, ‘cause Dean’s had gone to sleep.

“And you boys gotta hear me when I say this: it can’t happen again.” Missouri blinked her brown eyes at the both of them, encouraging their silent understanding. “Dean’s soul is only just wakin’ up, and there’s no limit to how much a spirit can leech off ‘a one consensual touch. It could do a lot worse than tuck it in.”

Her bangles clattered as she put a pacifying hand out to quieten the protests Dean could practically hear next to him. “I know you wouldn’t. I’m just makin’ it known, honey.”

Dean thought back to the day the Earth was created – or rather, to the day that a big bang restarted Dean’s world. He had been thinking about how eventually he would have to move out, and how Cas would be stuck with someone who didn’t appreciate having a ghost around as much as Dean did. Dean thought about how maybe, that day, instead of being hugged by Cas, he might have been cradled in Cas’s arms after his soul had been unwittingly sucked from his body. Dean thought about how he might have been the ghost instead right now, his unfinished business being Castiel.

Dean did not want to think about that what-if any longer. He pushed it to the back of his mind, along with the other things he didn’t want to think about, like life before Bobby, like life with Bobby but without Sam, and like life after Bobby died.

He didn’t spend a second longer in that dusty file cabinet in fear of the locked trunk of feelings next to it. The trunk may have been chained and locked and packed inside another trunk, but that didn’t stop it from screaming and yelling at Dean while it jolted menacingly and violently rattled.

The lamp next to Dean flickered, and he patted the trenchcoat. It wasn’t the first time a light had guided him out of that dark room.

But if Cas could come back somehow, anyhow, then it would be the first time a hand would guide him out.

It was unlikely, but they had to try.

“Any chance of Cas being resurrected without the help of my soul?” Dean asked, trying so hard to be hopeful but knowing full well the answer.

Missouri didn’t even shake her head. She just looked at Dean, and that was all the confirmation he needed. While he knew it was coming, it was... good, coming from someone else. Definitive. Conclusive. It meant that Dean could finally start to accept it.

Dean picked up the coat and refolded it in his lap. There came a point when he stopped folding and started stroking, and Missouri excused herself to do or get something. He hadn’t been listening.

“It’s okay,” Dean said aloud, to everyone and to no one, to his ghost and to himself.

It was just another feeling Dean would shove in that trunk.


	13. Chapter 13

A call from Captain Mills had them on the road again. It wasn’t Crowley she had in for questioning, but Andy Gallagher, the man who’d broken into Dean and Castiel’s home. He was working with the Leviathans, something Cas already put forward to them on the mirror, so it wasn’t a surprise when Jody confirmed it.

Baby was tolerating having a ghost riding shotgun more than she was on the journey down, and Dean rubbed her dash to show his appreciation for it.

“Good girl,” he muttered. “We like Cas, don’t we? Yeah we do.”

The music fritzed for a moment, and Dean smirked.

“It’s hardly a secret that I like you, man. I don’t let just anyone sleep in my bed. Not that I like Sam that way, but – you know what I mean. Shut up.”

It was amazing how easily Dean slipped back to the one-way conversations he had with Cas before the soul-sapping touch happened. At least, he thought so. Dean initially wondered whether they’d ever be able to go back to normal—if interacting with the ghost haunting you was normal—after the precious few days they’d spent corporeally together, but it was as simple as slipping on sweatpants at the end of a difficult day.

Dean snorted. It sounded like a song he’d hear as he begrudgingly walked through the mall.

 _You’re the sweatpants I put on at the end of the day_   
_and talking to you is like watching ballet_

Not that Dean ever watched ballet or ballet-related films, or had daydreams about being a ballet dancer, or even knew what ballet was. However, if Dean were to describe what watching ballet was like, he’d say, _’Uhh, kinda calming, maybe a little exhilarating, I don’t know, and like it’s the only thing that exists in the world? Shut up.’_

 _Huh._ So maybe taking to Cas was exactly like that after all.

A smile spread over Dean’s face, and it broke into a grin when the music crackled again.

“If you keep messing with my baby, I’m gonna open a window and throw your coat out of it,” he threatened emptily, prodding the coat for good measure.

The air chilled, and Dean chuckled. He was surprisingly chipper despite everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, but then he remembered that he had no right to be chipper, and Dean’s smile dropped with a silent clatter by the pedals.

The enemy had broken into his home easily. There was no way to bring Cas back to life, or something to make him visible again. Sam still hadn’t found a piece of evidence that would send Roman down for life or more. Though the PD kept tabs on known Leviathans, they still hadn’t been led to any of the big fish. And finally, the most mundane yet irritating to Dean’s life, Charlie still hadn’t gotten back to him about that brake light, which wasn’t like her at all. Usually Charlie was stuck to her technology like barnacles on ships, and would always send a _Working on it!!_ text if it took longer than five minutes for her to find something.

As _Miracles Out Of Nowhere_ played over the radio, Dean mused on one of those facts in particular. He’d asked Missouri if there was any way to resurrect Cas without the help of Dean’s soul, but what if Cas didn’t want to resurrected? Cas never spoke about living the rest of his life. In fact, he’d talked about Heaven more than he’d talked about walking the Earth again. Had Dean just assumed that Cas wanted to return to the shitty world that killed him off in the first place?

He paled as he realised the answer was a resounding _yes, you selfish bastard,_ and wiped a hand down his face to help mask the vulnerability he was so used to hiding.

By the time the first instrumental was coming to a cacophonous conclusion, Dean had successfully managed to appear nonchalant-yet-enjoying-the-sounds-of-Kansas, but the radio cut through his bullshit and plunged into static, then silence.

“Oh no, Baby, come on! All my tapes are in the trunk! What am I gonna listen to?” Dean whined.

 _“You could listen to me,”_ the radio suggested in Cas’s voice.

Dean almost crashed the car.

“What the fuck?”

 _“I’ve been working on it for a while,”_ Cas said, pleased with himself, _“trying to speak remotely. I’m still in the passenger’s seat, but I’m using my abilities of electrical manipulation to tune the radio into the... 'ghost frequency’, if you will.”_

“Thanks for the simplification, Einstein.”

Cas’s voice was coming from his baby, and Dean willed himself to think only about the road ahead.

“So what, if I carry around a walkie talkie, we can talk steamlesly?”

_“I think so.”_

That was… “Awesome!”

Cas would be able to talk back when Dean chatted to him! Cas could inject dry humour into Dean’s life without the aid of a mirror! Cas might maybe probably possibly whisper sweet nothings into Dean’s ear! Cas could audibly laugh at Dean’s terrible jokes!

The potential of Cas being on the other end of a walkie talkie had Dean beaming all the way back to Cook County, the thought of Cas moving onto his next life forgotten. They chatted about this and that, artfully dodging the important topics in their lives, such as the case and their visit to Missouri. Dean didn’t think it was possible to miss a voice he’d only heard for a few days, but there he’d been, missing the way Cas sounded like Baby’s tyres rolling over a cheap parking lot. It crackled even more over the radio, but Dean didn’t mind. It didn’t come with a tangible body, but Dean didn’t mind. All that was going through his head was _Cas Cas Cas_ (so just like he talked, according to Jo), but Dean didn’t mind. Not in the least.

Sam was waiting for them outside the station on the checkered path in one of his suits that made him look more like a history teacher than a lawyer, and gave a wave when they pulled up. However, his preoccupied smile turned into an exasperated frown when he saw Dean’s ear to ear grin.

“Did you forget you got burgled last night, or did Missouri tell you you’re gonna win the lottery?”

“I need a radio,” Dean said first, a spring in his step, the tie of Cas’s coat dragging along behind them,“and hello to you too. No I didn’t, and Missouri’s not a psychic, she’s a medium.”

Sam muttered something about apples and oranges (bitter his ‘joke’ didn’t land, in Dean’s opinion) and walked them towards the front desk. The smile he had earlier returned without its preoccupation when he saw the receptionist, and grew when she smiled in greeting right back at him. Sam was sappy like that; he enjoyed meeting his very first love again. Dean certainly couldn’t say the same for himself, not with the way Robin gave him the cold shoulder any time he stepped into her diner.

“Hey, Amy. How are you doing? How’s Jacob?” Sam asked, ignoring Dean’s lewd nudging.

“I’m good, we’re good, yeah,” she said, her eyes crinkling. “You?”

Sam nodded, tapping his fingers on the desk, as distracted as a teenager with one thing on their mind. “I’m good too. Here to see the captain about a burglar.”

Amy laughed, and Dean felt invisible. _So this is how Cas feels twenty-four-seven,_ he pondered. He clutched Cas’s coat closer, and rubbed his thumb along the lining, hoping Cas could sense or see it. Dean didn’t want Cas to feel forgotten just because there wasn’t a medium or a mirror or a radio.

“Hardly a man about a dog.”

“Hardly,” Sam agreed. “Could you let Jody know we’re here?”

While Amy called Jody up, Dean winked at Sam, who rolled his eyes. “I have a girlfriend, Dean, who I miss and love deeply,” he said in a hushed tone.

“Maybe you should tell Amy that,” Dean muttered out of the corner of his mouth.

By the time Sam finished sighing, shaking his head, and whispering about how _just because you can’t stay friends with your exes, Dean and we can’t all choose to forget the good stuff and dwell on the bad, Dean,_ Amy had put down the phone and directed them to the detectives’ pen.

It looked exactly as it did three years ago. The black balloons and solemn faces were gone, the paperwork and smell of coffee back. Dean had taken a few moments to steel himself before they walked in, but there was no need. The memories of running up and down these halls playing cops and robber with Sammy outweighed the memories of the wake, and there were no serious pats on the shoulder or _‘I’m sorry for your loss’s_ to remind him (how was that for forgetting the good stuff and dwelling on the bad?). Instead, they were met with surprised smiles, and even a hug from Garth.

“Long time no see, friends!” Garth said in Sam and Dean’s right and left ears, respectively. “We’ve missed ya ‘round these parts!”

At the desk opposite Garth’s empty one, Tracy Bell grunted and shrugged in some sort of agreement. The rest of the cops, who were scattered around desks, various doorways, and the water cooler, raised their pens and mugs in greeting.

The commotion, though it was more of a vague buzz, the kind that would make one question whether or not there was a bee in the room, was enough to bring the captain out of her office. The pen fell silent, as though they were listening to hear if there was a bee in the room, and the captain beckoned the boys into from whence she came.

As much as everyone looked exactly the same, Captain Jody Mills was the exception. It was a good exception, one she wore well. Her uniform was navy and decorated, a far cry from her plain clothes suit with pens in the breast pocket, and her cocoa-coloured hair was much shorter than her previous long bob, but she was still just Jody in their eyes; the woman who did what she could with two boys running amok around the station on weekends when Bobby reluctantly played Captain over father.

The first thing she did was hug Dean very tightly, trenchcoat and all, and the second thing she did was hug Sam very tightly, and for a little longer. _Sha,_ and Jody didn’t play favourites.

“Boys,” she beamed with a bob of her head. “It’s good to have you back in the station.”

“We missed you too,” said Sam, smiling back at her.

“Lovin’ the new do, by the way.” Wiggling his fingers by way of gesturing to her pixie cut, Dean accepted the invitation to the Grinning Idiots party and added, “You got the number of the hairdresser? Sam could do with the same kinda thing.”

Sam rolled his eyes, but didn’t stop smiling.

“Oh, this ol’ thing? Got thirty-something likes on Facebook, whatever that means.” Jody walked around to her desk as she spoke, an indicator that it was time to address why they were here. She sat, clasped her fingers, and smiled tightly.

The brothers looked between each other, and silently—and in sync—sat opposite. The reunion was over with, and only business was left to attend to.

“So. Early this morning, you apprehended Andy Gallagher, the intruder who attempted to steal documents pertaining to a case Sam is building, correct?”

They nodded.

“And if I’ve got this right,” Jody said, pausing to sigh quietly, almost in disbelief, “this case you’re building, Sam, is against Dick Roman.”

They nodded again, and Dean changed up his grip on the coat. His hands spanned the folded width of it, patting it protectively, but not too often that anyone would notice.

“And _specifically,_ it’s stringing Roman up as the leader of the Leviathan group.”

Jody waited for them to shake their heads, and her mouth hardened into a line when they nodded yet again.

“Boys. We’ve been over this. Roman is watertight. We can’t get to him. The last time we tried, people got murdered. You lost a father, and the community lost two important figures.”

It was like when they were kids, and they had to spend a night in a safehouse after Bobby received a death threat from some criminal he put away. Sam and Dean were busy playing with Lego on the way there, in a different car to their dad, oblivious to the danger the Singer-Winchesters faced. They’d pulled up outside the safehouse, and Jody had turned around to tell them the kiddie-friendly version of what was happening. She was blunt, but she didn’t needlessly frighten them. She told them the truth, and informed them of what to do should anything bad happen.

Though he put on a brave face, Dean was scared. Scared for Sammy and their dad. Scared that somehow, everything that could go wrong would go wrong, and he’d be alone like before. But little Sammy was nonplussed. Little Sammy piped up with, _“Even if that does all happen, Bobby ‘n’ Dean’ll stop the bad man. They got it. They always do. See you tomorrow!”_ and jumped out the car.

Sam always had unwavering faith, and it was that faith that he implemented in convincing Jody otherwise.

“We’ve got a source who’s supplying us with hard evidence, and if we can get Andy Gallagher to talk, maybe offer him a deal, then we’ll have more. Jody – I wouldn’t put my entire firm on the line if I didn’t think we could do this. I wouldn’t put Bobby’s honour on the line if I knew we were gonna lose.”

Dean watched the stand off. Sam was staring intently at Jody in that piercing _you know I’m right_ way of his, and Jody was staring back, her dark eyes narrowed, her face the personification of a clock’s second hand in pause. It was so tense, Dean reckoned even the sharpest of knives would bend and warp under the pressure of trying to cut through it.

The tension broke when Jody sighed. “You understand that all of us will be made examples of if we fail, right?”

They nodded.

“Then let’s pray we don’t fail,” she muttered with a look to the heavens.

Hanging from the ceiling of the interview room was one singular light, swinging ever so lightly. It did that whenever the door opened, and made for some excellent intimidation judging by the amount of confessions that spilled onto the table beneath it.

Andy Gallagher sat under the oscillating spotlight, his eyes tracking it, fascinated.

“He had a baggie of marijuana on him when we searched him, and we’re waiting on blood to come back from the lab. Ten bucks says our perp’s a little high right now,” Tracy murmured to Dean.

Cross-armed, they watched him from behind the two-way mirror, with Jody and Sam keeping an eye on the interview from the other side of the security camera.

Dean smirked. “I’d bet my entire shop that he’s a little high right now.”

Tracy laughed, a sound as rare as people pretended diamonds to be. A natural lull fell in the conversation, but Dean expected no less, what with not seeing the detective in three years. She was a rookie the last time they spoke; hot-headed and quick to hold grudges over the smallest of things. Dean eyed her for a moment. Though Tracy was still guarded, by her arms and her personality, her ease in the place indicated that she’d relaxed into the job instead of waiting for it to bend to her.

_Bobby would be proud._

He smiled, and changed the subject to something they could talk about for more than a few sentences. “So where’s Benny? Slacker takin’ the day off?”

Tracy frowned. “You didn’t hear? Benny retired. Found a place out in the woods. He’s pretty much a recluse, now. I guess he spends most his days hunting for his dinner. I don’t think they have Walmarts out where he is.”

“Why’d he retire?”

“Guilt, mainly. I think. He was our undercover guy for any case, but when they switched up and Captain Singer died, he started drinking again. Kept saying it should’ve been him.”

She went quiet. Tracy’s eyes were glazed with memories, and Dean knew a cue to stop when he saw one. It had been hush hush, but way back when, Tracy and Benny had a thing. The both of them were enigmas, and Dean always thought they suited each other well, that they’d end up the Ross and Rachel of the station. But apparently it wasn’t meant to be.

Dean patted her on the shoulder, and she nodded before her heels clacked on the concrete on her way out.

While everyone got into position, Dean sat at the table mirroring the one in the next room. It was for long interviews, Bobby had told him, for body language experts or authorised journalists or lazy cops. He waited for the door to slam open and to set the light swinging again so he could see Gallagher’s reaction.

Yeah, so maybe Dean wasn’t even close to forgiving the guy for breaking and entering, even if he’d inadvertently helped them out r.e Cas’s ‘object’.

_“You’re frowning.”_

Dean almost fell out of his chair.

“Cas? You scared the life outta me!” Dean frowned.

He squinted in the low light, searching for some sort of indication of where the ghost was. Or to be more specific, where his voice was coming from.

 _“Apologies,”_ a green light flashed.

Ahh. There was a radio charging on the table, right in the corner of the room. Dean picked it up and cradled it.

_“If I did scare the life out of you, at least we wouldn’t have to worry about our method of communication.”_

Dean snorted, ready to retort, but through the two-way, he saw the door open. “It’s starting!” he exclaimed.

 _“All we need now is popcorn,”_  Cas said dryly.

Tracy and another detective Dean didn’t recognise the back of sat opposite Andy, who was in awe of the lightbulb, and probably seeing psychedelic spots distort before his very eyes. Dean’d been there before, in the very same interview room. Even in Captain Singer's library of vocabulary, nepotism was not a word.

“Good afternoon,” Tracy started. “I’m Sergeant Bell and this is Officer Masters. Could you confirm your identity for us?”

“I didn’t know she made Serge,” Dean mumbled, pride swelling his chest.

From the other room, Andy Gallagher crossed his arms and drawled, “Andy Gallagher.” The tips of his fingers curled around his skinny arms, the long sleeves of his hoodie hanging onto his wrists. He looked exactly like the bong-hitters Dean hung out with, minus the usual appropriation of Rasta culture.

“You’re here because you have been arrested for breaking and entering. Do you understand?” the Sergeant continued in a bored voice. Dean didn’t blame her.

Andy nodded, and Officer Masters added, “However, we’re willing to offer you a smaller sentence for any big info we don’t have on the Leviathans. Specifically, Rich— Wait, we’re flogging  _this_  dead horse again?” She was stabbed with a stare, and Masters shook her head and sighed. “Specifically Richard Roman.”

There was silence but for the popping of imaginary corn, until Andy’s chair creaked with his non-existent weight as he leaned forward. His wild eyes narrowed, and he almost seemed sober when he stated his request.

“I want protection.”

Tracy’s coal hair shimmied side to side. “Information first.”

“I wanna be given a new name in a new state,” he countered with.

“And I want unicorn-shaped tater tots, but we can’t all get what we want, can we?” Officer Masters sniped.

Once again there was silence, but only because Tracy was gaping quizzically at her, and Andy was grinning open-mouthed in amusement.

“What?” Masters shrugged. “I like unicorns.”

 _“I like her,”_  came Castiel’s buzz through the radio.

Dean watched the scene through the mirror more intently.

Under the questioning peers of four people (three of those invisible to him, the other one in a different dimension entirely), Andy crumbled, and finally, water flowed through the fountain of untapped information.

Recalling that Sam had been sans laptop when they met, Dean hoped his brother remembered shorthand.

Gallagher gave them enough information to be relocated to Oklahoma under the name ‘Ansem Weems’, but there was one peculiar tidbit he tacked on after he’d been granted it.

“Roman made me realise things,” he’d whispered after failing to beckon Bell and Masters closer.

“What kind of things?” they’d asked in sync before glaring at one another.

“Things like, I can put thoughts into people’s heads – any kind of thought, any kind of person.” Andy chuckled to a straight-faced crowd. “You don’t believe me. Well, your guy behind the glass? Boom! Gay thoughts!”

He shot finger guns at the mirror, and the women wrapped the interview up, leaving Dean with nothing more to watch.

 _“Dean?”_  Cas asked in mock-trepidation.  _“Did it work? Are you thinking gay thoughts?”_

“More like bi thoughts, and it doesn’t take Professor Xavier to make me think them.”

Castiel laughed over the radio something infectious, and even Dean’s makeshift face-mask protected him from catching it too. His hand fell away from his mouth to wipe a tear from his cheek, and Dean only just about collected himself when his phone rang.

 _Charlie_ _,_  the caller ID announced, to which Dean replied, “About time.”

 _“Oh my God, Dean_ _,”_  she gasped before he had a chance to ask about the brake light,  _“I’m in trouble!”_

The laughter was punched out of him with those three words, and he stood straight, no trace of the smile that was there a second ago when he asked, “What kind of trouble?”

 _“Big trouble,_ trouble _trouble, like season two Jemma Simmons kind of trouble! I’m a hen in the wolf house, Dean! Oh my God, LARPing did not prepare me for this—”_

“Charlie! You’re rambling. Explain!” barked Dean.

_“O-okay, but you can’t be mad!”_

His reticence promised nothing.

_“I… I kinda infiltrated the Leviathans and I think they’re onto me and are maybe going to silence me Avox style?”_

Holy crap on a stick. Was  _everyone_  Dean knew secretly undercover on a mission to take down the Leviathans?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you can see, this now has a definitive number of chapters! Only ten more to go, and I plan to have them all up by the end of March. That's if I don't hit another stride of writer's block. But hey! Here's hoping. Talking of hoping, I hope you enjoyed the chapter! Things are going to get a lot more plotty from now on, if they weren't already :L


	14. Chapter 14

First Dad. Then Cas. Now Charlie. What, was Sam going to tell him that he’d been catfishing Crowley? (Although, that wasn’t a bad idea.)

 _“Dean?”_ squeaked a timid Charlie. _“You still there?”_

“I’m here.”

_“Are you mad?”_

Dean pinched the bridge of his nose. “No. Course not. How safe are you? When you said they were onto you, is that a sure thing?”

_“I have no idea. I’m clueless. I’m Alicia Silverstone in nineteen-ninety-five. My manager gave me a look like he ate a sock by accident or something when I backed up my hard drive today, and I thought he might go through my activity log, so I replaced it with a fake, but I’ve still got these files, and— I’m rambling. Oh my God, what if they’ve bugged my phone? What if—”_

“Charlie.”

_“Right. Rambling. Can you meet me someplace safe? Actually don’t do that. If I’m seen with you then that’s gonna put them on red alert.”_

A lightbulb flickered on above Dean’s head, and it wasn’t even the doing of Castiel. “How ‘bout we meet through someone?” he suggested. “She could call me, leave her phone on the table, and I’m in the back somewhere listening to the conversation.”

 _“She?”_ Charlie’s fear was chased away by the prospect of a lady. Of course.

“I got just the girl,” Dean told her, mentally calling in the favour he was owed.

They arranged to ‘meet’ at _Home_ the next day. _Home_ was a Wizard of Oz themed diner and the safest place on Earth. It was Charlie’s favourite place, not just due to the hot Dorothy who was actually called Dorothy too, and it also happened to make the best pie in the city – but that had nothing to do with it. Home was a good place full of good people, and it was aptly named.

A voice that was not Castiel’s called for the detectives in the briefing room. Though he was but an honorary officer, Dean made his way there, accidentally-on-purpose leaving the trench on the back of the chair. As he closed the door, he heard a surprised and petulant call of his name. A thousand apologies never left Dean’s lips, and he continued on. He couldn’t have Cas around for what he intended to ask, and he shouldn’t really have brought him along for Gallagher’s interview. Dean wanted to pretend everything was fine, as per usual, but he couldn’t ignore the signs – the signs being smarting lightbulbs, spitting static, and singing appliances.

Sam was waiting for him by the door, and they entered together, taking a seat at the back behind the real detectives. Meg slunk in at their sixes and shut the door behind her, and Jody began.

“Good news, detectives. We got enough to smoke out Crowley.” She grinned, and a patter of applause filled the room. “Now from what we know about him, he won’t be easy to crack, so I want the full works. Warrants for any places he’s been seen in, camera footage, his browser history, even what tailor he uses. Anything that can be used as evidence against his plea of innocence. Sam Winchester, the lawyer back there”—she singled out Sam, and all heads turned simultaneously towards him—“is working with us on behalf of his firm, and he’s already shared the evidence he’s gathered about the Leviathans.”

All heads turned back to the front, and Sam let out the breath he’d been holding. Dean bit down a smile. _How adorable._ Poor kid still got stage fright from impromptu attention. And for that thought, he got an elbow in the rib.

Dean rubbed his side while Jody wrote the notable evidence Gallagher had given them on the whiteboard.

“So, something Meg has told us before: Crowley is the head of recruitment. But if Gallagher is willing to testify along with the other people he mentioned would, then it’s a start on taking apart that sector, like we did with the prostitution rings and the identity fraud. Gallagher also gave us the tactics he learnt from watching Crowley, and the names of his henchmen.”

Assignments were given. Garth, along with another detective, was to make the drive to Oklahoma with Gallager and hand him over to the WITSEC there. Tracy was to lead the task force to take Fergus Crowley in. Meg, who apparently worked under Crowley until she switched sides Snape-style, was to talk them through the strategies she’d learnt while in the Leviathans.  

Everyone left the briefing room to hunch over their paperwork apart from Tracy, who took Sam aside to discuss the files he had, and Garth, who was adding the final touches to the minutes.

When he’d closed the lid to his kitty-decorated laptop, Dean beckoned the lanky detective over. “Garth – do me a favour?”

“Sure thing,” he nodded, his hair flopping with the bob.

“Ask Gallagher about Castiel Novak.”

Garth scrunched up his nose. “Castiel Novak? As in—”

“Yeah, Clarence Trust Castiel Novak.”

“Well, sure, Dean, I can do that, but… why?”

Dean respected that about Garth. As much as he was a follower, he was never a blind one, and he was never afraid to ask questions, no matter the simplicity of the answer.

“‘Cause I think Ca— _Novak_ had a personal hand in his rehabilitation, and to turn on the guy who helped you out of a bad place must take a lot of… a lot of… a lot of _something,”_ Dean explained, stifling a yawn. “If you find out what Crowley-slash-Roman bribed him with, we might get an insight into the rest of his men.”

“Okie dokie, I’ll ask and report back,” Garth said with a salute. He turned to go, but instead glanced back at Dean and asked, “Why aren’t you a police officer again?”

Dean didn’t grace him with an answer, and instead shooed him with a glare.

He jogged back to where he’d ‘accidentally’ left Cas, and entered the room with as many sorry’s as he could fit in a breath.

The radio crackled in annoyance. _“What were you doing? I know you didn’t forget about me.”_

“I’m sorry, Cas. I’m tired. You’ve seen me in the morning. When I’m tired, I’m stupid. Technically I’m stupid all the time, but whatever. That’s not the point. So I’m sorry, okay?” Dean hoped he sounded irritable and contrite enough to be believable. He was truly both, but there was a lie spread between them, not unlike a sponge cake, and Dean had told enough fibs to know that he worked best with the Method.

 _“It’s been a long day. You should rest,”_ Cas suggested, guilt lining it. And hell if that didn’t make Dean feel guilty too.

“Tell me about it,” Dean muttered.

The break in. Aimlessly wandering around the city. Driving. Meeting Missouri. More driving. The interview. That was one hell of a long day.

He had been tempted to say that he could rest when he was dead, but he would have been saying it to the wrong crowd. Plus, he was pretty tired, tired enough to fall asleep without worrying about the case or Castiel or if Sam was happy or how the shop was doing or if Baby’s radiators rattled a little more than usual.

Dean would sleep. As soon as he’d called in that favour.

 

Dean entrusted his brother with the trenchcoat, promising the both of them he’d be home soon, and no he wouldn’t fall asleep on the road. Sam was a worrier like that. Initially he’d refused to let Dean go unless he had a nap first, but Dean chugged coffee and grabbed a couple of power bars out the vending machine, insisting they would be enough. Cas wasn’t best happy either, and Dean had retaliated by switching the radio off.

Yeah, he’d pay for that later.

He pulled up outside Jo’s place. The lights were on, but that didn’t necessarily mean she was in. It could have been one of her roommates, Cassie or Anna or Ruby. And Dean wasn’t really in the mood for any of them, not when he’d had that _thing_ with Cassie and that other thing with Anna and that hatred of Ruby.

But Dean chanced it anyway, and rang their bell.

Ruby answered, which was a strange relief, and said plainly, “You look like shit.”

He grunted in neither agreement or disagreement. “Jo in?”

She pointed him upstairs, and her glossy hair slapped Dean in the face as she spun and went back to snuggling with Anna on the couch. There was no doubt that that hatred was a two-way street. Departing to Jo’s room with a half-hearted wave to two-thirds of her roommates, Dean creaked up the stairs, hoping both that he wouldn’t bump into Cassie on the way, and that Jo wouldn’t consider the favour too large.

Dean knocked on her door, and she greeted him with a sharp intake of breath and a stunned, “You look like shit.”

“So I’ve been told.”

At least Jo said it as a friend and not as a bitch.

The last time Dean stepped foot in Jo’s room, it had been plastered with photos of her and her friends, her and her family, her and the cars she’d fixed, and her and her boyfriend. Now, the lattermost pictures had been taken down, leaving gaps in her happiness.

“Yeah, I need to print out a few more of me and my fixes,” Jo said, noticing where Dean’s gaze was pinpointed. She clambered on her bed and crossed her legs, leaving him the floor. “What’s up? You didn’t text. And you never drop by unannounced. You’re too weird around everyone.”

She wasn’t wrong. As much as Dean saw himself in her _(not like that, perv),_ there were also echoes of Sammy. Which is why, he supposed, he valued her as an adoptive sister too much to think of her in any other way.

Dean took a deep breath. “Remember a few days back—shit, no, it was _yesterday,_ jeez, today has been long—anyway, remember yesterday, when you said you owed me a favour for the night before?”

“Yeah…” Jo said as her eyes narrowed.

“I need to call it in. And it’s a big one.”

Jo crossed her arms. Crossed legs, now crossed arms. It wasn’t looking promising. And after vague-splaining it (a portmanteau that Jo favoured after many non-conversations about Castiel), Dean wouldn’t have been surprised if she was just cross in general.

Dean took another deep breath.

“My friend Charlie is in trouble. Don’t ask, ‘cause I can’t tell you what kind of trouble. I need to help her, but if she’s seen with me it’ll only make things worse. So I need you to go on a fake date with her. Oh yeah, she’s the queen of the lesbians. Super gay. Which is why it has to be you.”

They stared each other down for a minute, western style. Dean’s fingers itched for the non-existent gun at his hip as he felt the cameras zoom in on their harsh squints, and tumbleweed rolled by in the hallway. Someone whistled, and when Dean blinked, that’s when Jo took her shot.

“I’m not doing it unless you tell me why.”

He rolled his eyes and flopped on her bed. “I can’t tell you,” huffed Dean, who was officially too tired for this shit. “It’s sensitive information. _Legal_ stuff.”

“Then I’m not doing it,” she shrugged. “And you can’t bribe me, either.”

  
  


_The next day_

 

“I can’t believe you talked me into this,” Jo hissed, her eyes like charcoal before it was grilled.

Dean may have bribed her.

Everyone had their price, and Jo’s was pretty low. Dean had to let her do whatever she wanted around the shop for two weeks, and that meant no inventory. It was something he could take on easy, something that would take his mind off the case that was like a box of cereal that didn’t quite fit in the cupboard. All he’d done was open it, and the cereal had poured everywhere.

“You remember the plan?” Dean nudged her, and for the umpteenth time she parrotted it back at him.

After a mumbled sass, of course.

“You sure _you_ remember the plan?”

“Humour me.”

Jo crossed her arms with a look to the heavens. “I meet Charlie outside the diner. We enter together, holding hands. We go on a date and whatever, and I set my phone on the table with you on the other end so you can listen in. You enter, blah blah blah, sensitive information, done. I get to do what I want for two weeks.”

He clapped her on both shoulders, holding her blessed headstrong gaze for a few moments before pulling her in to give her a rough kiss on the forehead. “Be safe, okay?”

“Oh my _God,_ Dean, what is going on?” Jo asked, her cheeks as cherry as her lip balm. “Is this all some ruse? Are you selling me to the black market to buy a Nova ‘67?”

Selling her on the black market would be kind as opposed to the Leviathans taking her.

“It’ll be fine. Just follow the plan, and I’ll see you later, okay, little lady?” Dean told himself more than her, minus the ‘little lady’ part.

She nodded slowly, her eyes softening with the pet name, and accepted a quick hug before Dean nudged her on her way. He called her immediately and Jo answered after the first ring, but as per the plan Dean made her repeat so many times, she did not say ‘hello’.

Thankfully, as much as Charlie breezed through life as unpredictably as the actual wind, she was punctual to a fault. Dean didn’t have to hear Jo wait for long.

“Hi, are you my date?”

Dean could practically hear her wink. Perhaps this would be the day he discovered that Charlie was a one-trick pony when it came to acting.

“If you’re Charlie,” Jo monotoned.

Great. Now Dean knew that if he were to ever cast a play out of his friends and family (family meaning Sam), it would be an impossible task.

“I’d say yes to any name if it meant going on a date with you.”

Dean snorted. “Smooth, Charlie.”

If Charlie heard him, she didn’t say anything.

The bell dinged as they walked in the diner, and they ordered coffees in the middle of their stunted ‘first date’ small talk, which included Charlie presenting Jo with flowers and a card. Dean—or rather, Jo’s phone—was set down on the table between them. He screwed his eyes shut and banged his head against bricks when he realised that the downside of this whole undercover shindig was listening to how Charlie operated.

“So, Jo, are you on the menu?” she purred.

Working in her mom’s bar had given Jo the talent of countering any pick up line, as evidenced by her quick reply.

“I sure am, so how ‘bout you eat me?”

Charlie laughed. “Wrong thing to say to a lesbian. Might work on straight dudes, but it kinda has the opposite effect on us lady lovers.”

“Bite me,” Jo mumbled, lacking the confidence to snap it.

“If you’re into that,” said Charlie, sounding like she was shrugging suggestively. “Anyway. Let’s have second breakfast.”

And so Jo sat through Charlie talking about the numerous _Lord of the Rings_ cosplays she was working on (Femme!Faramir, Merry, and Arwen) while Dean kept an eye out for anyone tailing the date. Sure enough, Dean saw a rather raggedy man pushed out of a Mercedes within a few minutes. The man protested to the tinted windows, but gave up seconds later. He retreated to a sheltered doorway opposite the diner, which had the perfect view of where Charlie and Jo sat in the window.

Hufflepuff loyalty flared in Dean’s belly, so he went to douse it with coffee after making a note of the license plate.

He chose a table far enough away for his phone to fulfill its function, and within two minutes Dorothy was walking over with a gingham mug and a furry coffee pot.

“The usual?”

Dean nodded. He could maintain his cover _and_ stay awake. Sure, he’d conked out as soon as his head hit the pillow the night before, but he woke up more tired than ever. Probably something to do with REM cycles. Dean watched a documentary with Cas about them once, when Cas was still just lightbulbs and thirteens and fourteens.

Speak of the ghost, he certainly hadn’t been happy with Dean when he eventually came home. The radio grumbled and groused, not in words but in noises, and Dean had snapped back at them. The microwave set itself to thirty seconds as a threat, but did not hum when Dean dared it to. When Dean slammed his bedroom door, he didn’t see the flashing light of the lounge under the crack, and didn’t hear the TV. There was nothing. It was the kind of silent treatment Dean would teach at seminars. His was the example in which others followed, but he wasn’t a proud teacher when he found that Cas got all A’s. Dean’s head hit the pillow before he thought about what kind of teacher he was. It had to then, or it wouldn’t for hours later.

Dorothy hovered over Dean’s table, her cloth lingering a little too long over the shiny surface. Her firm mouth was more set than usual, and her eyes were anywhere but the mug she was filling.

He tried to catch her eye with a little wave, but to no avail. The number of drinks she’d poured over the years meant Dorothy’s ears were attuned to a nearly-full-to-the-brim cup, so she tilted her wrist back, and Dean went about that way of getting her attention, wherever it was placed.

After clearing his throat, he said, “I’m good with just coffee, tha—”

“Is Charlie on a date?”

Oh. So that’s where her attention had gone walkies.

“What? Oh, yeah,” Dean said, already telling Charlie about this in the future.

Dorothy managed to unstick her taffy eyes from the window table, and trained them on Dean, who shrank under them. “And you’re watching them because…?”

Sometimes, quick thinking eluded Dean. This was not one of those times. _Home_ ’s coffee would do that to you.

“They met online. I’m here to make sure Charlie’s safe.”

Well, it wasn’t a complete lie.

“That’s very… proper of you,” Dorothy replied, buying it with a raise of her chin. She returned to the counter, her braids over her left shoulder as she stared at the window table, her hips sashaying in and out of chairs.

Yeah, that was definitely one to tell Charlie when they could talk next.

Dean held his phone back to his ear, hoping he hadn’t missed anything important. He glanced over to the doorway on the other side of the road, where the ragged man was still sentinel. Writing on a napkin to remind himself to tell one of the detectives of the man, he looked up to see Charlie looking back.

She pointed to the flowers Jo held, and said in a terrible British accent, “Mum’s the word,” while Jo frowned at the inside of the card. Dean couldn’t read it from his position, but he could see something taped to the message.

Whatever it was, he’d find out later.

Before he could listen to another awkward sentence, the two actually _giggled,_ and the next thing Dean heard was a dial tone. Jo pocketed her phone and in a faux stretch stuck two fingers behind her head, flicking them at Dean.

Open mouthed, he almost betrayed his cover as he wrapped his head around Jo telling him to peace out. That wasn’t the plan. And technically, because she hadn’t followed the plan, Dean couldn’t make good on his side of the deal.

 _Nah,_ he thought, finishing his joe. He couldn’t do that to her. Hell, Jo had to put up with Charlie chatting cosplay for ten minutes. As a non-Ringer, she deserved a medal. Jo was more a Percy Jackson girl _(“But not the dumb movies!”)_ than anything.

Dean left with a wave to Dorothy, who, though five feet away, was apparently elsewhere, and texted the road he would wait in to Jo. He checked the parked cars for the Mercedes as he walked out, but there was no sign of it. Just as well he’d already written down the plate.

There were only twenty minutes of _classic rock, every hour of the day, every day of the year_ before Jo slid into the Impala, chrysanthemums sweetening her already sweet face. She thrusted the card into Dean’s chest, which did indeed have something taped inside. It was what Dean presumed to be the hard drive Charlie backed up the day before last, and the whole reason for the fake date in the first place.

“The card says you’ll know the password by now,” Jo said, buckling up and throwing an accusing look at Dean.

Dean missed it while he replayed all the contact he’d had with Charlie over the last couple of days, and came up short. Unless it was something obvious like _Home,_ he had no idea. He replayed all of it again, and stopped on half an hour ago. Zooming in on Charlie’s terrible British accent and pointing finger, Dean smacked his head without losing the brain cells.

“Chrysanthemum. The password’s chrysanthemum.”

Jo took his word for it, and they drove off. Dean checked the diner and the doorway opposite as they slowed for a bus, and saw that while Charlie was still in _Home,_ now  in conversation with Dorothy, the ragged man was gone.

They spoke about the ‘date’ on the drive back to Jo’s. Getting her first impression of Charlie was like digging in a goldmine that doubled as a comedy gig. _‘She’s nerdy, but not in like, a_ nerdy _way’_ was one Dean almost crashed his car hearing, and he put on his best shit-eating grin when he heard Charlie planned to take her larping.

“Watch out; she’ll dress you as her handmaiden.”

Jo pulled a face. “No way! I’m being a knight.”

“Her knight in shining armour?” Dean asked, the words coming out like treacle off a cool spoon.

“Only while you guys have to meet through me,” she replied, pinkening anyway. Dean loved that he was the only person who could make her blush. Jo didn’t so much, and pouted until the colour ran to her lips. “What’s with that, anyway?”

Dean only turned up _classic rock, every hour of the day, every day of the year._ Avoidance was also something he taught a seminar in.

There were blue and red lights flashing outside his apartment building when he parked up.

Sam found him first, trenchcoat fisted in his hands, and Dean wanted to grab it and tell him to _hold Cas_ right, _damnit,_ but he didn’t. Instead, he stared at the once-tan coat. It was dripping black, and Sam’s hands were black too. As black as the Impala, but shinier. Dean hadn’t washed her in a few days like he ought to have done, and—

“Dean.” Sam’s voice was like a bell among pigeons in his head. “We don’t know how, but they know. Your whole apartment...” He swallowed thickly. “Dean, your whole apartment – it looks like an oil spill.”

He kept talking, kept explaining, kept describing as Dean used Baby as his anchor.

First Dad. Then Cas. Now Charlie. And now his apartment – the very apartment that gave him so much comfort and safety.

Now, comfort and safety were as distant as flakey as his biological dad, and there wasn’t exactly a Bobby of apartments waiting to take him in.

Static hissed through the radio, and Dean agreed.

Failure was not an option. Righteous revenge would see them through. Roman and Crowley and the rest of the Leviathans might have numbers and money and media on their side, but Dean had a lawyer, a hacker, a police department, and a ghost on his.

The Leviathans didn’t stand a chance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So what are you all thinking so far? I'd love to know! This is rather different from anything else I've written, mainly because it requires me thinking about more than what would be cute :L
> 
> Hope you enjoyed the chapter! :)


	15. Chapter 15

It was the fifth time Jody suggested a safehouse, and the fifth time Dean refused.

“No, he repeated slowly, “I’m staying at Sam’s hotel. If you wanna contribute, you can pay.”

Jody narrowed her eye the way only moms could. “Dean Winchester, if you think for a _minute_ that the police are letting you out of their sight, you are stupider than even _you_ think you are. You can stay at the hotel, but my officers will be patrolling the building and the surrounding area. Deal?”

Dean grunted his assent.

“Deal.”

If the Leviathans wanted him dead (or maimed or seriously injured), he would be. This incident was merely a threat. Although as to why he received it, Dean came up short.

“Forensics’ll be done by the end of the day, and the insurance you dad took out means all your belongings are covered.” A breath of relief left Dean’s lungs at that. All his books, tapes, records, clothes, and DVDs would have been a bitch to buy again. “You could be looking at moving back in a month,” Jody continued, reaching across to pat his stone fist. “In the meanwhile, we’ll be doing everything we can to find out who did this.”

She might have been using her comforting mom hands, but she wasn’t using her reassuring mom voice. It was her reassuring cop voice, and Dean’s teeth couldn’t help from gritting. He would have preferred the former.

“Dean?” called Jody. “Everything alright in there?”

Dean forced a smile and a wink. “Everything’s peachy.”

He didn’t need to look at her to know she didn’t buy it.

“Take care of yourself. I’ve always got the ingredients for my chowder at home,” Jody said, her voice personifying a memory-foam mattress.

Dean’s knuckles rapped on her desk as both thanks and goodbye, and he grabbed his jacket off the back of his chair as he left.

Apart from the two detectives at the water cooler, everyone was hunched at their desks, typing up reports and putting the work in paperwork. Garth’s desk was still empty apart from the pile of folders that had grown since Dean walked past last, and Tracy reached over to add to it.

As he saluted her on his way out, she remarked,“You should take a couple days off.” Her earnest eyes refused any answer but a nod, so Dean nodded.

He stopped at the door to shrug on his jacket, and almost punched a newcomer in her unimpressed face when he wrestled with the sleeve. Dean started to apologise, but she seemed unfazed by the ‘almost’, and ignored him to address the department.

“Officers. I’m Agent Ballard, and this here is Agent Sheridan.” A dark haired man with equally dark eyes followed her in. “We’re with the FBI, and we’re taking over the Leviathan case.”

Castiel has taken to sitting cross-legged on the table while Sam does his work with the TV on in the background. It means that whenever he speaks through the radio, Sam looks at him. Well, technically he looks a few inches to the right of Cas’s knee, but it’s better than nothing.

He itches. His whole body feels as though it’s caked in dried mud. His very essence feels dirtied, like the apartment is. Castiel doesn’t know whether that’s part of why, all he knows is that he doesn’t like it. Not one bit.

“Everything okay?” Sam asks, his eyes never leaving his laptop.

“Of course.”

Communicating through a radio channel has gotten easier. Before, it was like squeezing through a tight space. Now, it’s like Castiel is dawdling through a meadow. A smoking, charred meadow.

Sam purses his lips. “My laptop’s fritzing. And you’re a terrible liar.”

An offended tut leaves his invisible lips. “I infiltrated the Leviathans.”

“Yeah, and look how that turned out,” says Sam after snorting.

Point taken.

Sam returns to writing up the notes he made while Castiel recalled his time in the Leviathans, and Castiel continues to sit. Technically, he’s hovering a centimetre above the table, but it’s the veil’s allowance of sitting.

The clicks of the keyboard are constant and soothing. They remind Castiel that he is helping, even if the word of his mouth isn’t audible.

The absence of Dean is constant and worrisome. He is keeping to himself, and does not speak his thoughts around Castiel. He’s vague, secretive, and more worn in the face than Castiel’s ever seen him – and that’s when he does see him. He mumbles in his sleep, something he only used to do when he hadn’t spoken to Sam in a while, and does not smile.

Recently, Castiel finds himself wishing Dean’s soul were dimmer. Then he never would have materialised, the Leviathans would have never been mentioned, and Dean’s grief would still be in a suitcase growing dust at the back of his mind.

Castiel was content with his lot. Floating around Dean forever was never a horrid prospect for his immediate future, but now everyone is hell bent on the Leviathan case, and Castiel might never see Dean again, or Sam.

A sigh from Sam has Castiel realising that he’s sunk through the table, as if his moping was literally sinking him. Sam shuts the lid of his laptop with tentative hands, and looks to where he thinks Castiel’s eyes were.

“How are you feeling?” he asks Castiel’s chin.

“A downside of communicating through radio is that I can’t write emoticons,” replies Castiel, his own airless sigh rustling the radio waves, “so I will just have to say ‘sad face’.”

The hazel eyes do not break chin-contact.

Castiel sighs again. Apparently, the breaths in his and Sam’s lungs want to crash the hotel room and party together soft-rock style.

“I don’t think Dean is willing to open his eyes to the full extent of my predicament.”

“Yeah, that’s Dean. He’s not so great with the agency of the people he loves.” At that moment, after those words, Castiel is the most grateful he’s ever been that he’s a ghost. If he had blood, it would be rushing to his face. If he had a beating heart, it would be facilitating it.

“What do you mean?” Castiel asks, his voice controlled.

Sam pauses for thought before elaborating, his arms folding in the short moment. “He still thinks you can be human again, right?” Taking the ghost’s silence for a nod, he nodded back. “And that’s why Dean wants you to be. I’m not saying he’s selfish, not at all. My brother is the most selfless person I know. I’m saying that Dean tends to be blind to his family having different opinions to him.”

And that makes… a lot of sense. Sam is good at making sense. He’s talked Dean through many things, though Dean hasn’t talked back. Sam is like a rock with a mouth, Castiel thinks. However, he doesn’t say as much. When he was alive, he said pieces like that, and the people around him would edge a little further away. Castiel doesn’t want Sam to edge away.

The keys start clicking again once Sam stops waiting for Castiel’s half of the conversation, and they don’t stop for another forty minutes or so. Every now and again, Castiel adds information he forgot, or rectifies a comment he previously made. Sam says this is all for evidence, but he’s been asking questions about Castiel’s life after death too, gaining knowledge that wouldn’t matter in an investigation.

As per Dean’s wishes, Castiel has told Sam nothing of the ‘us of it all’. It’s not difficult not to, but it does put an ache in his chest, an ache that is nothing like the one he gets whenever Dean comes home, or even when Dean goes to work. It’s an empty ache, one a doctor might say he has no grounds for and that the pharmacy has no pills for.

Something red and not blood fills the ache before he knows it, and then there’s _him_ on the TV screen, his dead eyes and smarmy smirk fooling millions of viewers.

_“And here he is: the man whose name will go down in history,”_ says the blonde lady at the desk, preening unconsciously. _“I have with me today Richard Roman, and he’s got a little something to share with the class.”_

She smiles wider as she hands over to the walking, talking, diseased penis. He smiles back, and the lights by Sam’s bed burst.

Sam yelps. “Cas?! What the—”

_“Thanks Kathleen, and please, call me Dick.”_

“Oh, shit.”

The radio snaps, crackles, and pops as though its in a rice krispies commercial, and the wires running through the walls hum and burn from the inside out.

_“Today is a sad, sad day. Three years ago to this day, a dear friend and colleague of mine was murdered. Castiel Novak was a generous, brilliant man, and tonight I am remembering him by holding a ball in his honour.”_

“Cas, you gotta calm down man,” Sam is saying. He’s on his feet now, speaking to the air above the table that Castiel is no longer occupying. “Cas, are you hearing me?”

Castiel’s nose would be pressed to the screen if he still had one, and the reason he doesn’t is because of _him,_ because of Dick Roman, and Castiel is so angry that it electrifies his hair and glows through his veins.

_“All funds will be donated to the charity for the homeless, Castiel’s charity: The Clarence Trust. It is a charity close to my heart, much like he was.”_

None of that money will be reaching the homeless. It will all be funding the Leviathans and whatever plans Roman has for them.

Roman smiles again, but this time there’s an attempt at grief in it, and it’s too much. All the plug sockets in the room fragment and explode, the bulb above the bathroom mirror dies, and the TV shuts off in an anticlimactic fade from white noise to black silence.

Castiel is on the floor – no, hovering a centimetre above the floor. His fists are in balls. His eyes are screwed shut. His mouth is a line. These are the things Castiel knows about himself apart from the fact that he is still filled with fury and hate and rage and animosity and—

“Cas, I’m gonna need you to breathe. Can you do that for me?” Sam asks. Sam is gentle. Sam is concerned. Sam is a rock with a mouth. Sam does not deserve to be screamed at.

“What good will breathing do?” Castiel screams through the radio, the frequency and pitch of the feedback screaming louder and higher. “What good can I do? I am dead because he killed me, and I will stay dead because his reputation cannot be killed.”

A beat passes, and Sam’s intuition has him on the floor too.

“You can help us. You’re still here because you were meant to help us. Don’t tell Dean this, ‘cause he’ll only think it’s stupid, like me believing in angels, but I believe in fate. I believe it was all meant to happen like this so you could help us take down the guy who killed Bobby. Who killed our dad.”

Castiel breathes. He’s always made it up as he’s gone along, but fate? He’s never even considered it. Not outside of his parents telling him of God’s plan, from what he can remember of them. (That’s _all_ he can remember of them.)

He can work with fate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember when I said I wanted to finish this by March? Ha ha, about that...
> 
> This chapter's been like this for a couple of weeks now, and I desperately wanted to write the whole charity ball in afterwards, but it just wasn't coming. I thought it would just be better to post than to summon the non-existent motivation!
> 
> You are all darlings for waiting around as long as you do <3 (especially when the end result is lacking)


	16. Chapter 16

Days off were a strange concept for Dean. He could do nights off, because they were for hanging with Cas, catching up with Dr. Sexy M.D, and sleeping, but days off? Dean was as clueless as the villains on Scooby Doo. Didn’t they know? There would always be meddling kids around. This, Dean knew because he currently was a meddling kid, and Roman was the big bad they were going to unmask.

However, Dean had to have a day off before he could do any unmasking. He didn’t drive around the city, as he didn’t need to think hard on anything, and he didn’t hang out with Charlie, as Charlie was currently collecting evidence for them.

He should probably have told Jody about Charlie’s situation. No, scratch that; Dean should have told the damn _FBI_ about her situation.

He shrugged as the elevator doors closed. It was his day off. He didn’t have to do anything but hang with his brother and his ghost. As Dean and the numbers went up, he laid down the ground rules for his day off. One, there had to be at least two Ferris Bueller references. Two, no shop talk. Three, no moping. Four, forget about any love he may or may not be falling in.

The elevator doors opened, and Dean saluted an officer as he walked to his room. As he entered, he was texting Jody about how efficient she was, and ‘are you this efficient with all your security measures, or just the ones that concern your surrogate sons?’ but his thumbs slowed when he heard Cas’s crackle.

 _“...and Meg, of course, tried to flirt the information out of me, but I had to appear to be having none of it. This didn’t please her, though—”_ There was radio silence for a moment. _“Hello, Dean.”_

“Hey, Cas,” Dean said to the chair sticking out opposite Sam. He did not make a snarky quip about diary entries. He didn’t even think about it. (Alright, so Dean thought about it for a _second._ )

Sam waved in his own way, and in the only way he could while typing with all eight fingers: he raised his eyebrows and made eye contact for a moment. The smell of coffee jarred Dean’s senses, and it was almost as though Sam was back home for spring break with a mountain of papers to write. Dean smiled before he remembered that that was also the spring break Sam came home two centimetres taller, thus growing taller than Dean.

It was a cliche, but it all seemed so simple back then. It wasn’t at the time, with three jobs and and a sexuality crisis, but with the magic of hindsight contacts, what once was a rocky road was now smooth tarmac.

But today was supposed to be smooth too, so Dean started the roadworks.

He told them of the FBI taking the case from the police, of their growing helplessness (though not in so many words). He told them of Charlie and her predicament (to which Sam exclaimed, “What?! Charlie knows the rules! No LARPing or – or infiltrating an evil organisation without a buddy!”), and of the unwilling involvement on Jo. Dean told them of his total non-plan to take the Leviathans down, because if he couldn’t admit it to them, how could they draw up any blueprints?

“Dean,” Sam started, his voice as sure as his piercing eyes, “you don’t have to have a plan. You’re a mechanic. Don’t think I mean that’s a bad thing, I just mean that… taking down bad guys is not really your territory.”

 _“But it is ours. Or it was for me,”_ added Cas.

Sam nodded in agreement. “And we wanna put them away as much as you do. Which is why you need to tell us these things. Call me. Text. Whatever.”

“I’ll keep you in the loop.” Dean breathed, and it was lighter, like one of the suitcases at the back of his mind had been unpacked for good.

Now, for his day off.

He flung his jacket on the free bed and followed suit. Sleep would be awesome, right about now. Dean wondered if it had the Magic Fingers function, and opened an eye to look around for a quarter slot only to be disappointed. Feeling two pairs of eyes on him, Dean opened both of his.

“What?”

“We’ve got news for you too,” said Sam with a grimace.

The TV switched on of Cas’s volition, where the local station was playing a rerun of the morning’s news.

More specifically, it was screening a close up of a murderer.

_“—charity close to my heart, much like he was. Of course, I’m inviting the whole police department too, to commemorate the loss of a great captain, who left us the same day.”_

The blonde anchor pulled a sympathetic pout. _“It must be a hard day for you, Dick.”_

_“No, Kathleen. It’s a hard day for America.”_

The TV switched off, this time by Dean’s purple thumb.

It was all of a sudden cold, and not the pleasant pillow kind. Dean breathed out, just to see how controlled it would be, and saw a tiny cloud before his very eyes. He gestured for the radio, which Sam gave to him with a huff, and turned the volume down.

“Cas, man, I don’t even care about my soul. Touch me, and you can materialise and scare the living crap outta them. Or testify. Solve all our problems. Over.”

_“I care about your soul. So no. Over.”_

A hurried cloud rushed out between Dean’s teeth.

_“I won’t, Dean. Besides, it wouldn’t work. You’re still recovering. Over.”_

“You won’t even try?”

_“You forgot to say over. Over.”_

Dean rolled his eyes, but the radio ended up on his lips all the same. “You won’t even try? Over.”

_“I don’t want to risk it. And I don’t think God would want me to. Over.”_

“I didn’t peg you for a bible basher. Over.”

_“I’m not. I just believe. Sometimes it’s easier to believe that everything happens for a reason. That I am parted from you for a reason I cannot change. Over.”_

The lips that were puckered against the plastic fell. So Cas thought the reason was concrete while Dean thought it was more jello shaped. _All couple had their differences,_ he told himself. _Cas and him were only a couple of buddies,_ he remembered and rectified.

_“God granted me this one wish, the wish I’d had for years, but granted it with stipulations. I think He planned this. Over.”_

Dean snorted. A genie with a contract. That was God, alright, if he even toyed with the idea of there being one. Dean never shunned it as much as he wanted to, with the amount of times he’d heard Sam praying. And it wasn’t as if Dean hadn’t prayed himself, no.

He placed his hand palm-up on the bed. Cas’s cool fingers laced with his, and Dean forgot the fourth rule he’d made just five minutes earlier.

The few (but gorgeous) suits Dean owned were ruined in the oil spill of the apartment, so he had to borrow a rental for the night. It fit, but it was ugly as hell. It was burgundy and even had a _sheen_ to it, of all things, and came with a black shirt to wear with. Sam did the noble thing (after laughing his ass off) and wore the matching tie and pocket square to make the most out of Dean’s money.

In the bathroom mirror that spanned an entire wall, they tweaked their hair by millimetres and pulled on their collars and ties like they were getting ready for prom. An evil organisation-run prom.

So exactly like high school prom.

“What do you think, Cas?” asked Sam, who couldn’t decide whether he wanted his hair behind his ears or not.

 _“You both look very handsome,”_ Cas supplied, drawing a miniscule smirk from Sam.

“I bet,” Dean replied, “but I’ve looked better, right? You’ve seen me in my fancy suits. I look way hotter in them than I do in”—he grimaced—“this monstrosity.”

Cas mulled it over for a second. _“If it helps, it looks less of a monstrosity on you.”_

Not the answer Dean was expecting or hoping for, but that would do.

There was no way they were getting past security with a radio on them, but Cas wanted to be there nevertheless. His coat was making an appearance no matter the tentative looks Dean shared with his brother, and Castiel was allowed to come on one condition: that he keep his emotions in check.

Neither brothers believed Cas’s promise, try though they might, and Dean was given the task of uglying up his outfit even more with the trenchcoat seeing as he was the normal sized brother.

And now to attend the ball, though the Impala was no pumpkin after midnight.

It was being held at one of Roman’s hotels, in a function room four times as large as any of the Bar Mitzvahs Dean had attended as a teenager. All the men were in suits a thousand times hotter than the sun, and all the women were in floor-length gowns that left nearly everything to the imagination. With his plate piled higher than ever, Dean was perfectly fine not imagining anything. Waiters and waitresses waltzed around with whatever those expensive tiny snacks were called and champagne, but Dean already had too much of a bad taste in his mouth to take advantage of free food and drink. A picture of Cas was projected onto the wall behind the stage, one that showed him laughing with a homeless man as he washed his feet. His birth and death dates were a footnote.

The lights dimmed, and Dean flexed his hand. It grew cold, and the lights returned to their offending brightness, as though they were a phone screen with a notification at four in the morning.

Sam nudged Dean when he saw Garth’s head pop above the crowd, and they made a beeline for the dolled up police department.

“Boys, what are you doing here?” Jody scolded, the lines between her brows not taking away how beautiful she looked in her sky blue dress. “And what are you wearing?” she directed at Dean.

“We came to commemorate Dad, same as you,” Dean replied. He folded his arms, the seams of Cas’s coat stretching to accommodate his biceps, and didn’t deign to answer her second question.

Her eyes widened, silently warning him, and she gritted her teeth. “We didn’t just come to commemorate him.”

“What do you—” Sam started, but he was interrupted by the deafening applause.

Roman slunk on stage and simpered for the crowd, and as he began to welcome everybody, Garth leant down to speak into Dean’s ear.

“I asked Gallagher what you wanted me to.”

“Tell me later,” commanded Dean, who was very aware of the invisible soul inhabiting the trenchcoat he was currently wearing.

Unfortunately, Garth wasn’t as aware. “No can do, I’ll be back at the station later! So I asked Andy about that Castiel Novak, and you were right. Novak—”

“Garth—”

“Novak rehabilitated him. Andy – sorry, you know I just get the willies callin’ him by his last name all the time. He’s a good kid really. So Andy said he didn’t know it was Novak’s old home he was breaking into. Said he wouldn’t’ve if he knew, no matter how much they paid him – even if it was in weed, and that’s a direct quote right there. He pretty much spent the whole ride gushing ‘bout your boy Novak, and gave me an idea to why—”

Tracy hit him and shushed the both, mouthing _‘I expected better’_ to both of them.

The air froze around them, but Dean’s hand didn’t join the fray.

He trained his eyes on the stage, on Dick Roman, who was really selling his three-year bereavement. There was even the glimmer of tears in his dead eyes.

Roman wrapped up his speech and held up his glass. “Here’s a toast to the best friend I ever had. Here’s to Castiel Novak.”

A murmur of, “To Castiel Novak,” echoed around the room, but before Roman could drink from his glass, it frosted, and he held on to it as well as one might hold onto a block of ice: not very well. It slipped from his grasp, and both the glass and solid champagne shattered on the stage.

Playing it off with a charming grin, he sauntered off, and the ball went on.

“Cas, you promised,” Dean hissed into his collar.

Some of the older ladies in the room adjusted their fur stoles, and a garcon’s lips were turning blue.

“Don’t make me leave you in the cloakroom!”

A nearby journalist tapped his microphone, and his camerawoman complained about her equipment.

“Alright, that’s it. I’m taking you off.”

With a look to Sam, Dean moved through the crowd. The air popped around him but Dean was past caring. He’d given enough warnings. He shrugged off the trenchcoat and handed it to the girl on the cloakroom.

“That’ll be ten dollars, sir,” she said, pulling a wooden coathanger from nowhere.

“Ten dollars?”

Ten dollars to rent a hanger for a couple of hours? If Dean didn’t already know Roman was a bad guy, this would be the final nail in the criminal coffin.

The girl smiled, but with tired eyes. “It’s for charity, sir. For The Clarence Trust?”

Dean muttered, “Freakin’ exorbitant,” while he pulled out his wallet. If only she knew who was in that coat.

The police department had dispersed by the time Dean made it back, and so had Sam. Dean craned his neck to look for the BFG, but there was no sign of Sam even hunching down to talk with someone half his size. He shrugged and made his way to the bathroom, where he didn’t have to do anything but what came naturally.

He was halfway through what came ‘naturally’ (and passing the time on his phone) when a spitting English hiss entered.

“I don’t care if you came here to let your hair down and be the belle of the ball, Cinders, I’m telling you to sell the damn sucro!"

Dean lifted his feet from the floor upon hearing that last word. Sucro was the stuff Benny led a whole drug task force against, back in the day.

“Dude, the place is crawling with cops!” another voice exclaimed.

“Find a corrupt one, then! That shouldn’t be too hard, should it?”

“I don’t even work for you,” the other voice said scathingly. Dean pictured her narrowing her eyes and crossing her arms.

The English one chuckled. The throatiness of it scratched the walls, and it was the kind of laugh that made Dean want to pull up his pants.

“Not directly, sweetheart. But we’re all part of a hierarchy, a hierarchy at which I am the king. Now, do I have to spend another fetid moment in a public bathroom, or do I have to recycle you to the bottom-feeders?”

The woman must have nodded, because he continued with, “Good. Now run along and make me some sales.”

Dean set his feet down again when he heard footsteps out the door, and thanked his disgusting habits that he’d brought his phone into the stall with him. He saved the recording and sent it to Sam and Jody for extra safekeeping.

Not even before Dean stepped foot onto the ballroom floor, the whole room went haywire.

People filming the event were furiously fixing their equipment to no avail, journalists were resorting to writing on their hands after being shocked by their dictaphones, and the hum of the general public was louder than Dean’s fridge when he couldn’t sleep.

He looked up and saw the warning signs in the bulbs, too.

“Don’t do it, Cas,” Dean whispered, but it was no use.

The lights straight up fizzed out, and then Cas took care of the emergency lights, too. In the dark, Dean ran towards the cloakroom. Sam was calling his name, but there wasn’t time to consolidate a plan. There was only time to stop Cas from becoming a bad guy, too.

Dean leaped over the desk outside the cloakroom and grabbed Cas’s coat, ignoring the calls of the girl he’d bouldered past.

“Sir! You can’t go in there! Sir!” she repeated, waving her torch in his direction. “I know Kung Fu! Si—”

Something cut her off, but Dean didn’t have time to care. He ran out of the building, trenchcoat in hand.

When he got to the Impala, he threw the coat in the passenger’s seat, but hung onto the tie. It creased in his tight fist as he pleaded, eyes flashing, “Don’t make me burn this damn thing. Don’t make me do it. I don’t know what’s going to happen to you if I burn it, but I sure as hell know that those people in there won’t be rained on by all the glass from the lights you’ve blown.”

Dean switched on the radio, allowing the ghost the chance to explain himself, but it was fruitless.

“Cas? You listening to me? You could have hurt those people in there, like seriously hurt them. You need to control your anger, man, ‘cause I can’t love someone who hurts people. I can’t.” His voice broke, and the tie went limp in his hand. “I can’t, but I do.”

_The cloakroom girl will do,_ Castiel thinks. There’s only a slight chance this will work, but he has to try nonetheless.

“Sir!” She waves her torch at Dean, and Castiel begins surging. “I know Kung Fu!”

He channels all his energy and being into her, and cuts her off mid-sentence. Her confusion very nearly squeezes out his consciousness, but Castiel’s anger tamps down and cements itself.

A ghost pacing up and down the cloakroom is much like shuffling along a rug in fluffy socks. Static builds up, and it needs to go somewhere. Dick is that somewhere.

It’s much worse that it was earlier, when Castiel was watching the news. It’s stronger. More desperate. It craves more. It’s a parasite, feeding on Castiel’s patience, reason, and calm. It sucks the light out of everything bright, including Castiel’s feelings for Dean.

This is the first promise that he’s ever broken.

Castiel starts repenting and apologises to the girl he’s inhabiting, but doesn’t allow her to reply. He doesn’t want to risk everything failing if he opens those floodgates.

He places the repenting on pause. It’s dark, but it has to be for his plan to work. People are panicking, and this should be about the time that their host supplies false excuses and makes light of the situation. Unfortunately for Dick, Castiel is the one who can manipulate the electricity.

Right on cue, Dick shouts from the stage, “Honoured guests! Please, stay calm.” The chatter quiets, so Dick stops shouting and starts projecting in his drawl instead. “There is a slight electrical malfunction, but I have my best people on it. There is absolutely no need to panic.”

Castiel feels for the lights above him. There’s a spotlight that’s willing to be directed his way, so Castiel directs in his way. He turns it on, and it sounds like a door slamming. The crowd gasps, and embarrassment flares up inside the cloakroom girl’s stomach. Castiel apologises again, and lets her go.

He walks out of her, and the spotlight follows him.

The girl’s soul isn’t as bright as Dean’s, but he is visible for a few seconds, and it’s enough. Dick mouths _‘Castiel?’,_ and the parasite inside Castiel screeches at seeing their name upon the betrayer’s lips not teen feet away.

Castiel disappears from the eyes of the living, and before he’s plucked from the air and returned to wherever Dean has taken his trenchcoat, he finishes his business. Transporting to the stage, he plunges his fist in Dick’s stomach and releases a surge of electricity. Roman falls to the floor in a heap, and there are screams and Sam shouting his name and paramedics rushing to the stage but it all means nothing. Castiel looks down at the man curled up like a foetus, and it means nothing.

Castiel feels nothing.

There is a shift in the universe. Perhaps he won’t be returning to his coat after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shout out to [currentlycrying](http://archiveofourown.org/users/currentlycrying) for coming up with the line _"Charlie knows the rules! No LARPing or – or infiltrating an evil organisation without a buddy!”_ and letting me use it! Thanks bab :)
> 
> Hope you all enjoyed the chapter!


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :O Another chapter so soon! I bet it's like Christmas come early for you all. Or something significantly less exciting, but still cool. Well, I'd hope it's cool, anyway. Hope you enjoy the chapter! It's one of my longer ones. Consider it a treat :)

_“I can’t love someone who hurts people.”_

Dean repeated it over and over in the same manner one might bash one’s head against their hand after saying something monumentally embarrassing, which was apt, seeing as he had.

_“I can’t, but I do.”_

_“I can’t, but I do.”_

He was still in the Impala, but had long stopped awaiting Castiel’s response. The trenchcoat laid limp in the passenger’s seat, and the radio had played three Taylor Swift songs in the last ten minutes with no other interruptions. It was nothing against Taylor Swift; it was her song content that made Dean want to reach for the kleenex in his glove box.

“She’s been through enough, and now the media, too?” he asked the empty air. All Dean needed now was a white sheet and smudged eyeliner, and he’d be a regular Chris Crocker.

He hit the off switch as fast as he could when a huge clunky hand wrenched the door open. It was suspiciously fast according to Sam’s eyebrows, but Dean paid them no mind. Let Sam think whatever. The Queen of England would come for dinner before Mr Stanford guessed what Dean had been willingly listening to.

Sam folded up the coat and slid it between them as he moved into the passenger’s seat. “Did Cas end up back here?” he asked, somewhat breathless.

“What do you mean?” Dean frowned.

“He… I don’t know, he possessed some girl to get close to Roman, walked out of her, then electrocuted him and disappeared. I’m worried.” The lines in Sam’s forehead said as much, too.

They both stared at the trenchcoat between them. Thoughts of proclamation of love went forgotten, and Dean’s stomach turned when he realised that he and Sam had come to the same conclusion.

“I guess he finished his unfinished business,” said Dean in one unhitching breath and non-pitched monotone.

Sam’s hair fell forwards as he gave the tiniest of nods. “I guess he did.”

The Impala purred as if to comfort them, and Dean patted her dash. “Thanks, baby,” he murmured under his breath.

As they drove back to the hotel, a conundrum hounded Dean. If someone died, and their unfinished business was a soul in the afterlife, how did they move on?

He drove a little slower.

A friendly face was waiting for them in the foyer when they arrived, one that set Sam beaming.

“Sarah?! What are you doing here?” He pulled her into his arms, his chin in the hollow of his neck as he smiled down at her.

From behind, Dean saw her rub Sam’s back and felt a pang in his chest. It was probably all the fancy tiny food he’d eaten at the ball.

“I missed you,” Sarah answered, nuzzling into his chest. “You’re here indefinitely, and I needed a vacation.”

“Yeah, we’re having a whale of a time here,” muttered Dean, pushing past the twitterpated lovebirds to the elevator.

“Hi to you too!”

She didn’t have much opportunity to continue what would have undoubtedly been a snarkfest, what with the bags under both their eyes, as Sam knotted his fingers in her long hair and swooped in with a kiss.

Dean didn’t hold the elevator.

Out of habit, Dean had brought the trench up with him. He clutched it and ran the tie of it through his fingers, caressing it as he would a lover – as he would have caressed Cas had he the chance, but it was too late. Dean had run out of time.

He switched on the TV, which was not the best of ideas, as every channel was interrupted with the breaking news of Richard Roman being hospitalised by the ghost of Castiel Novak. Across the bottom of the screen, the wrapping banner declared that popular businessman Fergus Crowley had been apprehended by the FBI on suspicion of gang affiliation. Dean texted Jody with congratulations, but it was nothing more than a distraction. Though his thumbs could pad across a keyboard, they could not press the big red button on the remote, nor could they mute the screen.

The evidence of Castiel Novak’s ghost came from numerous eyewitnesses, who the camera cut between in a medley of sorts. Dean wouldn’t have been surprised if he saw them autotuned any time soon.

 _“We all saw him,”_ one woman said, confused and eager.

A young man Dean recognised as the waiter with blue lips exclaimed, _“He was real angry. I tried to vine it, but he shut off all the power and tech except for this one spotlight. It was awesome!”_

 _“It was nothin’ but a false apparition. Devil’s work!”_ an elderly man spat.

It cut back to the first woman. _“He was young, and… and hot!”_

 _“We’re all thinking of Dick right now. What that thing did to him was nothing short of savage.”_ A middle aged man in an expensive suit shook his head. Dean didn’t have the heart to snigger at the first part of his sentence.

 _“Eh. There was probably weed in the vol au vents,”_ shrugged the elderly woman accompanying the angry elderly man, much to his horror.

How had Cas done it? Had his tether to his trenchcoat become something of an elastic band? Only, instead of Cas pinging back to Dean as he should have done, it finally broke.

Dean ignored the update on Roman’s health and laid back, his hands cradling the back of his head.

“I hope you’re happy up there, man,” he whispered to the ceiling.

A shiver zipped up his spine. The dial for the AC was all the way across the other side of the room, so Dean layered up by shucking the trenchcoat on. It was tight over the burgundy monstrosity, but it was almost as if Dean was being hugged. He sniffed the collar of it, and while it smelt like damp and steam and paper, there was still something inherently _Cas_ about it. Maybe because Dean always imagined he smelt like new books and mown grass and ocean air, and they were vaguely similar. Not that Dean would ever discover if he was right or not.

It had been a week since Cas first materialised. A long week. That meant a week of sleep Dean needed to catch up on.

Seven days. Lives had changed in less. More specifically, Dean’s life had changed in less. Getting caught up in the foster system. Losing Sam. Being adopted. Finding Sam. Going to the gym one time, meeting Lisa. Breaking up with Lisa. Getting back together with Lisa, only to find her pregnant with someone else’s child. Moving into a new apartment and meeting the ghost who haunts it.

Dean ran the highlights of his showreel until the tape flapped and even he had left the theatre.

Judging by the next segment on the news, he was woken up by Sam only minutes later, who was trying to wrestle the coat off him.

“Dean. You can’t sleep in this. It was behind a tile in your bathroom for years, there’s probably mildew spores everywhere.”

Dean grimaced and let himself be undressed.

“And don’t sleep in your suit. It’s a rental, remember?”

Dean harrumphed and shooed his brother away so he could get naked in peace.

“I’m staying in Sarah’s room tonight, try not to miss me too much,” said Sam, a fond smirk playing on his lips.

“That’s my boy,” Dean replied, sliding off the burgundy monstrosity as though it was mouldy butter on warm china. He shook his face to wake his brain, flapping his lips and all, and in doing so remembered the news segment before. “They got Crowley, by the way.”

“I know.”

Of course. How Sam could be so tall and still have his ear glued to the ground, Dean would never know.

“Now take a nap,” Sam gently commanded, “a long nap. You need it. You deserve it.”

“And you go take your woman,” Dean mumbled into the pillow.

“She’s not my _woman,_ Dean, but—”

Dean dozed off before Sam finished, his even snuffling interrupting.

When he woke up, it wouldn’t just be the eighth day since Cas materialised. It would be the first day since Cas moved on.

Apparently Sam’s idea for getting Dean out of his ‘slump’ was to talk it out, and although Sarah had no clue as to why Dean was in a slump, she supported the motion. They cornered him in the restaurant, in his car, and even in the bathroom, wanting to talk.

The bathroom was the last straw. The bathroom was sacred, and in Dean’s eyes they defiled it.

“If you won’t talk to us, what about Charlie?” Sam called through the door. “Or Jo?”

Dean was silent through gritted teeth.

“How about that guy, you know, the detective? Weren’t they close?” Sarah whispered to Sam.

“Garth?” Sam whispered incredulously back.

“No! The bulky guy. He made us gumbo.”

“Oh, Benny? Dean, how about Benny? Would you talk to him?”

Dean considered it for a moment. Sure, he’d talk about it with Benny over a beer (non-alcoholic, in Benny’s case), except for the fact that he was now pretty much a hermit, according to Tracy.

By the sound of cogs whirring and halting on the other side of the door, Dean guessed that his brother had run out of names. However, Dean had many acquaintances, ones Sam had no reason to be aware of. As Dean flicked through all the faces and names and numbers and addresses he had in his head, he came across one who would listen and not judge, someone who wasn’t too close to the situation. Someone who would not understand, but who would be understanding.

He came out of the bathroom to see the couple with matching concern in their eyes and drawn in-and-up eyebrows.

“I’ll go talk to someone,” Dean started, pointing his finger between the both of them, “but I ain’t telling you who. You gotta trust me. And don’t ask me about it. This is my business, and I know you care about it ‘cause you care about me, but butt out. Got it?”

They nodded, and Dean grabbed his coat. Once he was out of the room, he took a moment to lean on the door, just to gather himself and his strength, and overheard Sarah ask:

“What was that about, anyway?”

“His roommate moved out,” Sam supplied, a downturn probably pulling at his mouth.

Sarah hummed. “The one he was totally in love with?”

“Yeah,” sighed Sam.

“Poor Dean.”

Dean scowled and stormed off down the hall, past the officers who were just rotating. He didn’t need their sympathy. He didn’t even need to talk to someone. He just needed to be left alone for a while. If Cas were there, he’d know that. Cas would flick the lights on and off every thirty seconds or so, just to let Dean know he was still there. Cas would hover his hand over Dean’s shoulder, so Dean could be on the cusp of alone and comforted. Cas would boil the kettle to remind Dean that many problems could be eased with hot chocolate.

But Cas was gone, and that was the problem. Cas had moved on, and now it was time for Dean to do the same.

“That’s easier said than done,” Nancy remarked in her soft spoken way.

They were sat at reception, with hot chocolates on coasters at her desk. It was late in the day, and neither of them expected any customers. If anyone rang, Ash was on callout. Dean told his favourite secretary he’d pay her for the overtime if it came to it, but she’d clutched her rosary beads and shook her head. There was a reason Nancy was his favourite.

He swallowed. “I didn’t even get to say goodbye.”

Nancy nodded. “You didn’t get closure.”

Dean shook his head.

“Did you tell him you loved him?”

“Not in, uh, not in so many words.” He didn’t count the time when he _had_ said it in so many words. However, after Sam told him what happened in the ballroom, Dean wasn’t so sure Cas was there to hear it.

The age-old question: If Dean Winchester declared his love for someone but they weren’t around to hear it, did it happen?

“Then perhaps he knew,” she suggested, her eyes shining like polished chestnuts.

“I don’t know, Nance. He was kinda caught up in his own stuff.”

There was a lull in the conversation, one that a half-unpacked suitcase at the back of Dean’s mind took advantage of.

“He hurt someone. Like really hurt them.”

Her eyes widened.

“He went from being this sweet guy to this angry thing in a couple of days, and there was nothing anyone could do.” Dean scoffed, remembering himself. “I don’t know why I’m talking about this. It doesn’t matter anymore. He’s gone, and he’s not coming back.”

There was another lull while Nancy figured out what to say to that. “Won’t he even come back for his coat?” she eventually asked, looking towards Dean’s lap.

Dean shoved it under his chair. “Nope. And I’m stupid for carrying it around like some kind of security blanket. You know I tried to wear it to bed last night? God, I’m pathetic.”

“Mr Winchester. Dean,” she said with a brave tilt of her chin. “You are not pathetic. You are healing. Healing takes time. And love… I hear love is an especially deep wound. You can’t put a bandaid on it and hope for the best.”

Nancy’s hand ventured out to touch his. “Alone is scary, but alone is a little less lonely when you have friends.”

Dean kept Nancy’s sage words in mind when Sam told him he’d organised a movie night.

Charlie showed up first, with all the Indy movies that mattered, and announced secret spy work off the table. Jo followed shortly after with snickerdoodles, and those were all the people Sam could muster up at short notice. Five people were certainly enough for the two doubles beds, with Sam and Sarah cuddled on one, and Dean with his two surrogate sisters on either side of him.

“So Charlie, you still gonna take Jo here LARPing?” he asked as they pressed play, an eyebrow challenging her.

Charlie waggled her own eyebrows. “Up for it, Harvelle? LARPing is perfect second date material.”

“I’m game,” said Jo with a private smile. “Why don’t you bring along that waitress, too? I’m sure she’d love to be your handmaiden.”

“Hey, the role of Charlie’s handmaiden is reserved for me only,” Dean protested, winking at Sam and Sarah’s snorting.

“And I never betray my most loyal.” Charlie stroked his face faux-reverently, and Dean melted into it like wax near a flame.

A few minutes later, Charlie shifted so her cheek was squished on Dean’s shoulder. “Dorothy wouldn’t come with anyway,” she said as though she were a pouting child. “She’s ace aro.”

“What, so like a super good archer? Why wouldn’t she want to LARP?” Dean frowned.

“No!” He earned a confusing slap on the arm for that one. “Dorothy is _ace aro._ Asexual and aromantic.”

Dean’s increasing confusion must have triggered Sam’s little brother know-it-all senses, because he piped up from the other bed with, “Doesn’t feel sexual attraction and doesn’t feel romantic attraction, Dean.”

“Okay, but… she’d still wanna LARP with you, right?”

Charlie shrugged. “Can we just watch the movie?”

They continued watching without interruption until Jo fell asleep on Dean’s chest. Dean watched her for a few moments, affection in his gaze, and rubbed a smear of grease from her temple. She’d been running the shop while Dean was elsewhere, so it was no wonder she was pooped. Absentmindedly playing with her blonde waves, Dean revelled in the heat of two other people beside him and the weights on his shoulder and chest. He was being enveloped in love and trust, and though it was completely platonic, it fulfilled him the same way a lover’s touch might. The same way Cas might have, had they crossed paths a little sooner.

Dean took in two lungfuls of air to distract himself from that thought, and the sudden rise of his chest woke Jo from her nap. Orientating herself, she turned and went back to sleep, drooling on Dean’s pillow. Despite that, Sarah grinned and whispered, “She’s so cute!”

When Sam made a noise of objection, she booped him on the nose and assured, “Not as cute as you, Samuel, don’t worry.”

Their nuzzling became a heavy petting session, complete with noisy breaths in between make outs, and Charlie and Dean simultaneously stated that they needed a drink.

Dean got up to raid the mini bar while Charlie inserted the next disc, and found enough to get either one completely drunk, or both considerably buzzed. And seeing as Charlie was her own designated driver, she opted out of both of those options.

With the drinks already out, Dean resigned himself to the first option.

It started out well enough; he agreed to cosplay Indiana Jones at the next con Charlie went to, eagerly imitated the instruments that laced the movie, and became so overwhelmed with love for everyone after the fourth bottle that he kissed everyone on the forehead (even Sam, who seemed quite pleased when it was his turn).

It was through The Last Crusade that the tide changed. Dean ended up in the bathroom after arguing with Sam about something probably unimportant and waking Jo up, and just sat on the lid of the toilet feeling as if he’d swallowed a bomb. That’s how everyone was treating him, weren’t they? As if he was a bomb about to go off, as if talking would somehow deactivate it, or as if distracting him would slow the timer.

But none of that would help. Steam, however, would help. Dean ran the hot tap and watched his reflection slowly fog up. He breathed it in, and felt the bomb shrink in his stomach. It cleared his airways, therefore cleared his mind. And it was with a clear (albeit drunk) mind that he took his finger to the mirror and wrote:

_I miss you._

When he stepped out of the bathroom, everyone was gone, Mary Celeste style. Charlie and Jo presumably to their respective homes, and Sam and Sarah to their room.

Nancy was wrong. Alone wasn’t scary.

Alone was terrifying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So these chapters are going to be pretty packed from now on! I had a couple of dead hours at work the other day, and I really went to town on fleshing out my chapter plans. It's going to be plot plot plot! Let's be real, I've probably bitten off more than I can chew, but luckily I have a huge mouth. I once put a whole jam doughnut in my mouth and ate it quite neatly.
> 
> I'm sure you could have gone through life without that image. Anyway. Leave comments on how you think this is going to go! I'd love to read your thoughts and theories.


	18. Chapter 18

_Assbutt_ was the first word that came to Dean’s mind when he woke up with a fuzzy brain and fuzzy teeth. It wrenched him upwards and turned his head this way and that, searching for the foreign source of it, but all it was was a memory of an invisible finger on a mirror.

 _“I got drunk and yelled at Sam last night. Why do I always end up yelling at him?”_ _Dean asked, the unwelcome echo of his father wiping his boots on the mat._

Because you’re an assbutt, _the mirror stated._

_Dean snorted. “What the fuck is an assbutt?”_

You. :)

The smiley faces; Dean ached for them. And the frowny ones. Sure, it was cute seeing them in reality for a few days, but there was something evocative about them.

Cas’s trenchcoat was strewn across the floor, a sandbank in the ocean of carpet. The sails in Dean’s heart were devoid of wind, as they always were when he was hungover, more so because the coat was devoid of a soul.

His phone buzzed, rattling every bone in his body. Squinting at the bright screen, Dean read his new message.

 **Jody Mills**   
Today, 09:14

_Said I’d save the FBI a call. You’re on their list of interviewees. You free today?_

Dean groaned. A formal interview was the last thing he needed right now. What would they even ask him about? His apartment? His father? His ghost? Whatever it was, it would need distraction beforehand.

He texted a time to Jody, avoided the mirror after showering, and clocked in his hours at the garage. With one of the parts he signed for being that brake light, the day was already going better than expected. There was only metal on metal (not including the metal Ash was playing), easy fixes, and grateful customers. Dean’s head still pulsed, but it was nothing dry-swallowed painkillers couldn’t suppress.

Nancy and he shared a glance as they closed up, but Dean shook his head. The hairs at the end of her braid fell out as she fiddled with its position, and somehow it reminded him of Cas all over again.

Another reminder meant another fix. Dean fixed another car, and it was sufficient enough to forget. He kept an eye on the time as he filled out the spreadsheets for the day, and it kept his mind off what it threatened to drift to, left unattended.

Soon enough, it was time to dredge up the not-so-sunk memories.

Dean found himself in the interview room with the intimidating lightbulb, only it didn’t seem so intimidating to him. For years for him and Sam it had been meditative, something to send them to sleep. Their dad would find them laying on the table, following the flickering light with their eyes and poking it with one of the older detective’s cane when it stilled.

He gazed up at the bulb, half expecting Captain Singer to shuffle in and grunt for the cane back.

The agents entered while Dean was halfway through a nostalgic text to Sam.

“Mr Winchester,” the lady he’d almost punched before greeted. “I’m Agent Ballard.”

“Agent Sheridan,” the other added as he flicked on the tape. “As I’m sure you know, we’re with the FBI. The Bureau sent us here to investigate allegations made against Richard Roman in regards to the ongoing Leviathan case.”

Dean leaned forward after pocketing his phone. “Yeah. I got that much. Why am I here?”

The agents shared a sharp look. Sheridan pulled out a chair to straddle while Ballard remained standing, and he prayed to the mods of TV Tropes that this wouldn’t be a real life good-cop-bad-cop scene.

“Let me put it this way, Mr Winchester: this whole investigation seems to centre around you. Your father was killed in the line of action against the Leviathans. His accomplice was the previous tenant of your home, the same home that was B and E’d, then vandalised shortly after.” While Ballard spoke, Sheridan counted her points off on his fingers. “Evidence against Roman and another man named Fergus Crowley was found in said home. A recent contact of ours has made it very known that they’re not only helping the judicial system, but they are helping you by feeding us information.”

“Got an inkling now?” smirked Sheridan, his dark eyes twinkling with something that unsettled Dean’s stomach like a bad burrito.

Folding his arms with a silent sigh, Dean waited for the questions, and made no promises to himself to answer them unsurlily.

It was all _was there a reason you didn’t hand the evidence over to the police immediately_ and c _ould any action you took towards the Leviathans be construed as provoking,_ and the even worse _did you have any connection to Castiel Novak besides your residence?_ Of course, there was also the repetition of everything he said, the skeptical eyebrows, and the scritch-scratch of pencil on paper.

The agents stepped out to take a sidebar, and Dean took a breath.

He took his mind far far away from the interview, using what Sam would call ‘meditation’ and he would call ‘shut the hell up’. First, he was in a bathroom, but he didn’t get even a hair of a chance to sit on the edge of the tub before his mind jerked him elsewhere. He was in three different places after that: an empty room with a letter pinned to the door, a drive in movie theatre with an older boy driving, and tucked up on a ledge, looking out a rain-stained window.

“Is that the best you can do?” muttered Dean, fighting the urge to bash his head against the table.

This moment was preferable to any of those.

Ballard and Sheridan strode back in, and the lightbulb fritzed. All three of them frowned up at it, but only Dean’s heart skipped from force of habit.

“Thank you for your time, Mr Winchester,” Agent Ballard said with a smile that was more of a grimace. Somehow, from the way she sat and Sheridan paced behind her, Dean didn’t think this was the end of the interview.

Sheridan turned his head as he paced, keeping eye contact with Dean the entire time. When the agent spoke, it was with a cool tone, as though a piece of his partner’s icy personality had gotten stuck in his throat during their sidebar.

“Listen, Mr Winchester. We think we’ve got enough to put Roman away for at least life, but we need more from you.”

“You need more from me?”

“And your brother,” added Ballard. She clasped her hands together and leaned forwards. “You two have been central to this case. We understand that he’s going to be working with the DA on this, but we want you as a key witness on the stand. We’re also using Sergeant Bell, as her involvement on the case has been restricted.”

 _So much for her revenge,_ Dean thought with the cock of an eyebrow.

“You’ve both been greatly affected by the Levithan’s actions, and we think that’ll sway the jury.” Sheridan stopped and pocketed his hands, squinting as he cast his gaze over to Dean again.

“The ol’ sob story,” Dean said so dryly his mouth became a desert. “This ain’t American Idol, Seacrest.”

Ballard tapped her fingers on the table. “Think about it,” she said after a beat. She tapped the tape off next, and they swiftly exited.

And Dean found himself thinking about it. 

A light drizzle darkened the headstones, and the wind was caught in the surrounding trees’ leaves. Another hole was being dug a few rows down, the burly woman trimming the edges with a spade, and as the rain dropped heavier, she flicked her hood up.

Sam popped his umbrella, and they crowded underneath as they walked. The grave was marked with white lillies, the unmistakable mark that it hadn’t been long since Jody’s last visit. She always managed to beat them to it.

“Hey, Bobby,” Sam greeted.

With white knuckles, Dean greeted the grave correctly. “Hi, Dad.”

The rain eked the wind out of the leaves, even snapping twigs for being in the way of the ground.

“Sorry we blew you off for a party thrown by the guy who murdered you,” he added.

Out of the corner of Dean’s eye, he saw Sam white-knuckling the umbrella handle. It was their habits and reactions that made them brothers, rather than their looks.

Water rolling from leaf to leaf filled the silence for them, and allowed them to think their words rather than say them. Then again, thinking their feelings was something Bobby taught them, not the rain. However, that wasn’t to say they weren’t taught not to express them.

As proof of the matter, Sam laughed. It was a short burst of a thing – shy and breathy, and only for the ears of stones and Dean.

“Remember when you went out to that drive-in movie instead of going to the birthday party the department threw for him?”

How could Dean forget? The memory had only flitted through his mind that day. It was unforgettable for many reasons, most of all Bobby’s response when Dean came through the door.

“Yeah,” Dean half-laughed back. “He said: ‘This won’t be the last time you blow me off for a girl. Or guy.’ then made me tell him about the date in _detail.”_

They turned back to the headstone, their smiles falling as gradually as the rain had earlier. The squelch of mud as another couple walked past evened the lull in conversation, but Dean was ready to even it all by himself. He owed Sam that much. Hell, he owed it to Bobby, to Cas, to everyone he’d ever held back from. Apologies were as hard as the coffin six feet below them, but the woman with a spade inside Dean was ready to dig deep.

“Hey, Sammy. I’m sorry. For yelling at you last night, and every other time. I’m kind of an assbutt when I’ve had too much.”

The corner of Sam’s mouth turned up, something Dean hoped was forgiveness. “You think I don’t know that?” he asked, nudging Dean’s arm. “And assbutt? Really? I always thought you were more of a jerk.”

“Bitch,” Dean replied on reflex, nudging him right back.

A gust of wind sent a shiver through the lilies, and the air turned crisp as Sam’s smile dropped into something more serious.

“It doesn’t make you him, you know that, right? Just because you get drunk and yell, it doesn’t make you Dad.”

As much as the sentiment was there, the last word coursed through Dean’s blood the wrong way.

“John,” he hissed through his teeth. “It doesn’t make me _John_ , you mean.”

Sam paused, and train tracks were built in between his brows. “Yeah, Dad.”

“John wasn’t our dad, Sam. Bobby was.” A droplet of rain spilled onto Dean’s shoulder as Sam’s _huff_ shifted the umbrella. “You call him Dad, but he was never a father to us. When you were a baby, he left us in motels for days with nothing but peanut butter and diapers. When you were a kid, it was just peanut butter, until we got caught up in the system. Your _Dad_ is the reason we were apart for so long, why you got sent to foster home after foster home, and why it took me and my dad two years to find you.”

Dean collected himself with a deep breath and looked his big little brother in his puppy dog eyes. He opened his balled fists and gestured to the grave, and continued, “Bobby raised you into the man you are today. He got you into law. He supported you when you wanted to go to a college on the other side of the country. So don’t – don’t call John ‘Dad’ when you won’t even call Bobby that. Please. You got that?”

Sam nodded, a pensive expression scrunching up his face.

It was only when they got back into the Impala that Sam spoke, with the muffled rain on Baby’s roof underscoring him.

“It’s just… Everyone I called ‘Dad’... They left, Dean. Or put me in another home. And I know that Bobby wouldn’t have done that, but it was always there, at the back of my head. He raised us, yeah. He helped shape the person I am today, I know. But so did you. So I’m not gonna call Bobby ‘Dad’ because then I’d have to call you ‘Dad’ too.” He finished on that, and pointedly ignored the stray tear Dean rubbed away.

The rain petered out, letting the soft rock that always knocked little Sammy right out flow through the car without any added percussion.

Dusk had set in by the time they reached the hotel, and they nodded their goodnights as they disappeared into their respective rooms. Dean heard Sarah greet Sam with kisses and murmurs, and no doubt they both heard Dean being greeted with nothing but the air conditioning.

He changed into the complimentary pyjama bottoms provided by the hotel, wrinkling his nose at the disposable papery-linen feel to them. Dean was a satin man at heart. Rolling into the centre of the bed, he groaned upon realising the light switch was just out of reach for both his hands. For a fleeting, exhausted moment, Dean considered sleeping with the light on, but ultimately his aching eyes won out. The sheets pulled and creased as he moved with the stretch of his arm, and Dean couldn't deny the cool, untouched expanse of off-white felt good against his chest (especially so against his nipples). His pointer finger shook as it approached the switch, but it was all in vain. The lights shut out a mere moment before.

His hand dropped, but Dean stayed on the left side on of the bed, as though he expected another body to occupy the right.

"Thanks, Cas," he whispered, a whisper that had gone forgotten this past week.

The lights flickered on again, only to dim in what was always Cas's ghostly interpretation of _'You are welcome.'_

Or at least, Dean thought they flickered on, because there was no way Cas was back, right?

_Right?_

 


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry to leave you hanging for so long! I didn't mean to, I swear. Here's a longish one to make up for my absence <3

Dean’s cheeks were wet when he woke, and so was the pillow. However, this was something easily disguisable by way of the hotel shower (and a quick making of the bed). He wished it were his own, but the police were still doing a cleanup on aisle home, and making it habitable for him, like he was a panda or something.

If only he were a panda, Dean thought as he was pricked by the needly spray. He could sleep, eat, and fuck the day away. That’s what pandas did, right?

He stepped out, ready to wipe the mirror clean with a wave of his hand, but he stopped dead in his damp tracks. However, not dead enough to see his friendly ghost.

Underneath his drunken _I miss you_ from the night before last, there was a shaky sentence:

_I’m right here. I’m watching over you._

And right underneath that, in a more confident font, was another sentence.

_You should have checked the mirror before you left yesterday. Your hair was as fluffy as a chicks. I wanted to pet it._

Something that was born of a sob and a laugh attempted to make its way out of Dean’s throat feet first, and he choked on it. There was no use in a caesarean. Somehow, he’d turn it around.

And turn it around he did, a full twenty seconds later, though it felt like twenty minutes.

“What, Heaven had enough of you already?” asked Dean to his foggy reflection. A shock—a welcome shock, the kind a surprise party would be—in the shape of a hand had all the hairs on his arm sentinel, and a bead of water dripped from his hair and ran down a cheek. At least, he hoped it was just shower water.

_I never arrived at the gates :S_

That fucking emoticon. Or emoji. Whatever the kids were calling it these days.

 _I think I needed to recharge,_ Castiel wrote. _Apparently possessing cloakroom staff is very draining._

“Yeah, you can write that again,” Dean muttered.

Below Cas’s previous sentence, a finger started to write _I think I needed to recharge again_ before Dean swiped at midair and called it a smartass.

_We should talk about the party._

“You possessed the cloakroom chick, got mad, hospitalised Dick Roman, the guy who practically rules the city, and disappeared for days. What’s there to talk about?”

There was not even a squeak of a reply from the mirror.

“Okay, so we should talk about it.”

_I apologise for breaking my promise. The anger: I can’t control it. To the point where it began to control me. Which is why I can’t let that happen again. I won’t accompany you to potentially triggering locations any longer. I know you like having my coat with you, but I’d rather you left it here from now on._

A pause. A wipe. Awhile for the mirror to refog.

 _My behaviour was inappropriate and life threatening, to more than just Roman. Do you l_ —The line was wiped out— _Do you think less of me?_

Dean took a second too long to answer, something the air did not receive well. The breath that left Dean’s lips became visible, as though a tiny nuclear bomb had detonated in his mouth, and he reached for the towelling robe on the back of the door.

“Quit doin’ that. You know I hate it when my teeth chatter.”

Cas’s invisible finger underlined his question, and Dean sighed in resignation.

“I’m sorry, alright? Maybe I thought less of you for a second, but not now. Not anymore.” He set down the lid of the toilet and sat. “I’d rather hate the thing you can’t control than hate you. Hate the random boner at the morgue, not the person with the boner, you know?”

 _At the_ morgue, _Dean?_

Warmth radiated through the room again as Castiel’s spirit emanated amusement and Dean wheezed with laughter.

“Yeah, my English lit professor always said my analogies needed work,” Dean said after sputtering the last of his laughter.

A smiley face appeared on the mirror, and Dean grinned right back at it. For that lingering moment, he completely forgot all the crap in his life. That’s what the people you loved did after all, right? They made you smile when the rest of the world was determined to see one upside down.

 _You have a beautiful smile,_ wrote Castiel.

“A smile is only as beautiful as the thing that put it there,” Dean replied, his voice as smooth as roller blades in a rink though his stomach flip-flopped.

 _Surely your professor couldn’t fault your poetry???_ The disbelief was clear by the sheer effort Cas put into his question marks, and Dean patted the marbled side of the sink.

“You’d be surprised.”

_Perhaps awed. I’d like to hear more sometime, if that’s acceptable?_

Dean snorted. His poetry was hardly Neruda, Plath, or Wordsworth. It was just his bottled up emotions on a page, and many pages at that. He didn’t write so much anymore, not since he’d started venting to his friendly ghost, but he did miss the process of it. The words would _plink_ out of his typewriter letter by letter, and sometimes he’d even get artistic with the space bar.

Once, on a frequent occasion when he’d been high in college, he wrote a piece about pie in the shape of one. It was in the book _High Time,_ and of course Dean had been high when he’d thought up the name, and of course he thought it was hilarious. If he’d announced it out loud to his stoner friends, they would have thought it hilarious too, but the realisation of his wit came at the cost of knowing Dean thought himself a poet.

“I think all my books are in some storage container somewhere,” he said, thinking that that was definitely where his typewriter was too. At least the Leviathans couldn’t destroy his vintage Underwood, a.k.a his second baby.

There was a pause, and then Cas scrawled, _You have whole books of poetry?_

Dean waved it off. Some might have seen in as faux modesty, but there was nothing cocky about Dean Winchester talking about his own poetry.

“Five. And a half. No one’s read ‘em but me. Not even Sam.” There was the proof of his modesty.

Of course, for Dean, modesty came hand in hand with embarrassment.

_I’d like to change that, if I may._

And Dean thought that Cas just might may.

A knock on the door interrupted their moment, and Dean went to answer it, ready to tell the maid that turn down could wait.

However, apparently the maid had shape-shifted into a sweaty jogger holding a green tea and a salad.

“Why do you look so happy?” the puzzled sweaty jogger asked. “Ew. Dean, did you jerk off in the shower?”

“Like you’ve never done it, bitch. Where’s Sarah?” Dean surveyed the hallway for his probably soon-to-be sister-in-law, hoping (for secret ghost reasons) that she was still in bed or out at the local galleries.

“I didn’t want to wake her up. She’s so beautiful when she’s asleep,” Sam mooned, a goofy grin spreading his nose.

“Cool it, Cullen.” Dean beckoned his brother in and slapped him on the shoulder, stepping back to say, “Cas is back in town.”

A blink dissolved Sam’s grin into wide-eyed confusion. “Cas is back? How? I saw him disappear!”

“Well, apparently he didn’t go very far. I found a message on the mirror just now.”

Sam winced. “So he’s not on radio any more?”

Shaking his head, Dean answered, “He’s weak, so no. And I don’t think he’s gonna be able to build up the strength to do anything but communicate through snail mail.”

“That makes things… I’m not gonna lie,” Sam said, sighing, “it makes them a lot more difficult.”

Dean was just as resigned as Sam sounded. “Yeah, tell me about it.” He breathed out through his nose and turned to beckon Sam into the bathroom with him, but changed his mind at the last moment and span back around to point his finger in his brother’s face. “But don’t take it out of him, okay?”

Miffed, Sam started, “I wasn’t going to—”

“‘Cause he’s apologised for the crap he pulled back at the party, and is flat out refusing to come with us anywhere in case he loses control.”

“That’s… noble, I guess. But we do still need him,” Sam insisted.

Oh, as if Dean needed telling how much he needed Cas.

They moved into the bathroom, where they found a sarky _i can hear you_ written in bored lowercase (damn Castiel as his penchant for watching linguistic documentaries at four am) followed by a more serious _Sam, I’m sorry,_ which the recipient waved off.

“So what happened after you disappeared?” asked Sam, shuddering when Castiel’s weary sigh pulled Winter up by the suspenders.

_I floated around in the ether for a while, where I was met with the true meaning of life. After I’d contemplated that for some aeons, I saw a light and decided to not to ascend to Heaven but to return here, instead._

“He ended up back here,” Dean translated, “and followed wherever the coat went.”

Just like the time he’d only begun feeling dizzy a couple of minutes after walking off the chairoplane ride, bile burned his throat only moments after he rehashed the later sentence. Because If Cas went wherever the coat went, then that meant Cas was at the station while Dean was in the denial phase of grief, he was in the car while Dean was playing Air Supply’s _All Out of Love_ on repeat, and most importantly, Cas spooned him while he napped in the trenchcoat.

Swallowing, he flitted around the most innocent of incidents where the coat was present.

“Hey, uh, the bulb in the interview room was flickering like a bitch. Was that you?”

_Obviously._

“And obviously you’re in a shitty mood all of a sudden,” Dean muttered.

Blinking between the mirror and his brother, Sam stepped in. “What did you think of the feds?”

 _I recognised Agent Sheridan,_ Cas wrote with an inordinate amount of care. _I’m not entirely certain from where, but I know him._

“Maybe he’s a philanthropist?” offered Sam.

_Maybe._

A call came through on Sam’s phone, and he stepped out to take it, leaving Dean and Castiel alone.

Dean leaned against the wall cross-armed, frowning at the floor. He licked his teeth in impatience. Impatience for what, exactly, he didn’t know, as there were too many things to be impatient about; for Sam to return, for the case to come up roses, to hold Cas in his arms, for everything to be fixed already, and to brush his damn teeth.

The mirror squeaked, and for possibly the first time ever, Dean did really, really not want to read whatever Cas had to say.

But of course he did anyway.

_It’s hard to take your frown seriously when you’re in a fluffy robe._

Tempted to see how Cas took his frown when he was naked, Dean’s lips twitched on a millimetric scale of a smirk. He started to loosen his robe but disguised it as a tightening when Sam walked back in.

“Roman’s fit enough to interview, apparently. They’re sending someone over to do it in the hospital.”

“Alright,” Dean sighed. “Let me brush my teeth and get dressed and shit. And I mean _literally_ shit, Sam, so go watch your girlfriend sleep.”

After Dean heard the hotel door shut, he sat back down on the toilet (with the lid down) and buried his head in his hands.

“I’m tired, man.”

 _me too,_ the mirror read.

Alright, so maybe Cas took the biscuit with his exhaustion due to the whole running on soul juice thing and the never sleeping thing and the unrested spirit thing, but Dean liked to think he was a close second. After all, all he did was work and worry and wonder, only sleeping in the little spare time he had.

Then again, wasn’t that everyone’s life?

Then again, not everyone had a ghost for a roommate. Not everyone was involved in a federal investigation to find justice, which also doubled as the light for said ghost to go towards.

Being tired was justified, Dean decided, and now it was time to visualise crapping out all his bad feelings. When he was writing for _High Time,_ one of his stoner friends had suggested it and it had worked like a dream, so Dean wrote a poem about the oxymoronic cleansing of browning the butthole.

Dean just wished he could see Cas’s face when he recited it.

While Sam was doing his lawboy thing (an affectionate nickname from Dean, while Bobby had always called him Mister Lawyer), Dean waited out in reception with the trenchcoat. He didn’t mean to bring it along, but apparently the force of habit was too strong. And hey, if Dean got bored waiting around, he could always excuse himself to go to the bathroom.

Occasionally he and Amy would make eye contact and force a smile, but they were both thinking the same thing: how many times Dean walked in on Sam and Amy making out and dry humping. It took all Dean had not to gouge his eyes out to cleanse them of the memories.

He checked his phone, not because if buzzed or anything, but because he was a normal human being in the year twenty-fifteen. Scrolling from conversation to conversation, Dean was reminded of how little contact he’d had with his friends recently. As a mountain man, Benny didn’t count on the guilt-tripping list Dean was making, but Charlie certainly did. Sure, there had been the movie night, but she had refused to talk about her secret spy stuff. Was she okay? Was she safe? Was she deliberately not texting Dean to keep _him_ safe? He’d have to buy a throwaway phone to be certain.

Sometimes, way back when before Dean ever thought about touching the sink when Cas was too, Dean would talk to Castiel in his head. Not like a crazy person, but like it was two in the morning and Dean couldn’t sleep or haul ass out of bed to go steam up the bathroom mirror. He would know exactly what the ghost would write, and would picture the conversation in his head. More often than not, it would send him straight to sleep. It soothed his worries, evened his breathing, and relaxed his racing heart.

Dean rarely went a week without a nightmare, but Conversations with Cas™ was like a neutraliser against them.

His foot tapped the carpet, his fingers played on his thigh, and his lips kissed to pass the time. Usually Dean would be in the pen like a shot, but with the feds crawling around the department like humongous cockroaches, there was no room for civilians.

Wiping a hand along his jaw in a way he’d once been told was ‘self soothing’, Dean pouted. It was as if he was ten again, swinging his legs and brushing his toes along the floor while he waited for Bobby to be done with paperwork. Only now, his baby brother wasn’t curled up asleep on the chair next to him but the one doing the paperwork.

And speak of the baby brother, Dean’s phone vibrated in his pocket.

 **Sammy**   
Today, 11:21   
_The feds threw the case against R &C out. Dismissed it on grounds of lack of evidence._

If ever there was something the self soothe about, this was it.

He stormed into the bathroom, wiping his hand across his forehead, his mouth, and then his neck. Draping (though it was more of a throw) the trench on top of a cubicle, Dean proceeded to kick the bottom of it. His toes were lucky he’d worn the boots with the steel caps today.

 _“Fuck!”_ Dean snapped, punching a door open. “They dismissed the case, Cas, they— _fuck_ —they don’t fucking care about the truth, about Bobby, about you. And they’re probably fucking corrupt, too, you’ve watched the news, you’ve seen all the shit about ‘em. Just… _fuck,_ Cas.”

A hand ghosted over his shoulder. “I know. I know, I know. I just… I don’t know. I could just really go for a drive, right now.”

Yeah, like his shaking hands and stamping feet could maneuver a car right now. Cas knew it too, by the chill against Dean’s chest, as though Cas was holding him. Dean swallowed against it, collecting himself in as many breaths it took, which happened to be sixteen – not that he was counting.

He really needed to take an anger piss right now.

Dean unzipped, took his dick in his hand, and tilted his head back. The force of the stream echoed his violent disappointment, and petered out when he imagined those feelings flushed down the toilet. He stood leaning against the wall for a few moments longer, his eyes closed.

Until the bathroom door lurched open.

“Peter, I will follow you into the little boy’s room,” he heard Agent Ballard declare.

He silenced a sigh. Why did these things always happen when he was in the crapper?

“Now are you going to tell me what your damage is, mister?” she hissed, and Dean imagined her perfectly manicured finger pointed right in his smug face. “Roman was clearly hiding something today, and where do I even start on Crowley? The slime ball gets his lawyers to do all the talking for him, it’s so damn obvious by that complacent smirk that’s always on his face that he’s guilty.”

“Diane—”

“Don’t _Diane_ me. We’re meant to be partners, so just tell me the truth. We had a perfectly good case, so why did you dismiss it? Without even consulting me?”

“There was no evidence!” Sheridan protested. “All we have are a few soft pieces, but nothing to incriminate either of them.”

Ballard tutted the loudest tut Dean had ever heard, even louder than Jody’s. “That’s a lie and you know it. We’ve got lab locations, we’ve got prostitution rings, we’ve got witness accounts to murders both of them have committed! We’ve got more than enough to give them both life, so what’s stopping you?”

There was a beat.

“I will go over your head if you’re not with me on this, Diane,” Sheridan said in a low tone.

“Good luck with that, Sheridan. You’ve stopped too low.”

Her heels clicked on the tile as she walked out, and after a long ten seconds, Sheridan’s heavy gait followed.

As soon as they heard footsteps quieten til they were too far away to hear, the air switched between room temperature and frosty, as though Cas was thirteen fourteen-ing real life.

“Yeah, I’m gettin’ there, I’m getting there,” Dean muttered as he flicked the faucets to the red side.

So far, this whole day was a huge _what the fuck,_ so whatever Cas had to say couldn’t possibly heighten the level of it. However, as condensation dripped from Castiel’s appearing words, Dean really regretted thinking as much.

 _I remember where I recognise him from,_ the ghost wrote. _He’s one of Roman’s lackeys._

Dean puffed out his chest using only a harsh breath through his nostrils. “No wonder he’s trying to throw it out.”

_Exactly._

“Ah, jeez,” Dean said in a similar way one might say ‘ah, jeez’ had they forgotten to dry up a mug. “We need to tell Jody.”

Jody stared for a long time. At one point, her eyes slid to the coat Dean held, but inevitably they latched back onto him.

“Dean,” she started in her captain voice, “I’m going to ask you a very important question.” Her stern dark eyes did not blink, even as she transitioned to ask in her mom voice, “Are you smoking again?”

Dean inhaled a sharp breath and shook his head. “Sometimes I wish I was.”

“Dean,” she started again, this time more baffled, “I want to believe you, don’t get me wrong. It’s just a little much to take in. I mean, ghosts? In my motherfucking precinct?”

He choked on his own spit, and they elapsed into laughter that went on just a few seconds too long.

Jody eyed him awhile longer, but it wasn’t as hard as before. This stare was more acquiescing. “Can I speak to him?” she asked, on the edge of her seat.

Seeing as Dean practically lived in bathrooms these days, he took her to the nearest one and made use of the precinct’s hot water again. Castiel wrote his piece as small as he could to fit it all in, and though he was one of the most concise people Dean had ever had the pleasure of meeting, he almost couldn’t fit it all on the mirror that spanned the alcove they stood in.  

Ever the detective, Jody rapped her knuckles on the wall. Once she was satisfied it was not hollow and there was not someone behind the mirror staging it, then she began her own Conversations with Cas™. She granted his existence unearthly, but spoke to him as she would any witness.It was freaky how efficient they both were about the whole situation. Then again, Dean supposed, there was a reason Castiel was granted permission for his undercover stint in the Leviathans.

When Jody had rounded up the info she needed to continue pursuing the case, she spoke on a more personal note.

“What about Bobby? Is he…?”

“As far as I know, he’s, uh, he’s up there,” Dean answered, pointing upwards.

An air of relief left her lungs. “Thank God. No offence to Castiel, but I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”

Jody glanced at her watch and said her goodbyes to the both of them. She had a long night ahead of her, most likely accompanied by Agent Ballard. And seeing as Sam was going to be sticking around the precinct for as long as it took for the case to be upheld, Dean took himself and the coat back to the hotel.

He crossed his ankles over the tub and brayed his lips. “What a day, huh?”

You can say that again.

“What a day, huh?” Dean repeated, smiling as they both recalled this morning.

There was nothing but the sound of running water as they took the time to breathe and think and realise how hungry they were (alright, so maybe that was just Dean), and there was still the sound of running water when Dean returned to the bathroom with a hand stuck in a packet of chips. Crunching and munching joined the album tracks on _Ambient Sounds of Hotel Bathroom,_ and when he crumpled the packet and tossed it in the trash after tipping the crumbs directly into his mouth, that’s when he could concentrate on using his mouth for something other than eating.

“I know I wrote it the other night, when I was kinda… inebriated, but I wanna say it now, sober. I’ve really missed you, buddy. Even if you were bitchy today,” he added, raising his eyebrows. The action almost fooled Dean’s brain into thinking that this wasn’t the equivalent of pouring his heart out. However, the fact that the person he was equivalently pouring his heart out to was technically dead didn’t make the fooling easier.

Slowly, as if the words weren’t coming to him until after he’d started them, Castiel’s invisible finger squeaked, _I’ve missed you too, even though I can still see you and hover near you. You’ve been maudlin. It doesn’t suit you for such long periods._

“I know. But hey, at least the next time you’re gone, you won’t have to see me being maudlin about losing you.”

_> :(  DON’T SAY THAT_

“Why not?” Dean shrugged. “It’s true.”

_It’s not going to be Heaven without you._

“It’s not going to be our apartment without you,” Dean countered.

He’d have to live with it just being his apartment, and only God knew about Dean’s track record for being alone. Dean berated himself for not being over what the therapist told him was abuse by neglect, but no matter how many times or how much he chastised himself, the fear wouldn’t leave his bones.

Another squeak brought him out of his head.

_I should tell you before I go. I might forget I haven’t told you yet._

“Don’t tell me,” he cut in before Cas could write any more. “I know. You don’t have to write it. I don’t want to see it disappear. I don’t want to see you disappear, but that’s something I can’t control.”

Instead of telling Dean, Castiel drew it instead.

Right next to it, Dean drew his own heart, though the one painted with his finger wasn’t breaking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: I was super anxious about doing my coursework and was getting nowhere with it, so I opened up my google doc for this and the words just came flowing out. It also calmed my anxiety. So who knows, you might get another chapter soon should I happen to procrastinate even more!


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